Preface to the Assembly

One who hears of the elephant’s crossing the river is still affected by the current. One who hears the nature of life is unborn is still held back by life. If one argues about bamboo shoots and braided bamboo twine in terms of before and after samadhi, the sword will be long gone. Then indeed, one has notched the boat. If one kicks out the wheel of activity, how can one in particular proceed down the one road? Please try to let me discuss it and let’s see.

 Main Case

Attention! Priest Shinzan questioned Priest Shuzan, saying, “Knowing clearly that life has the nature of being unborn, why is one held back by life?” Shuzan said, “The bamboo shoot eventually becomes a bamboo. Right now, as bamboo sheath can you use it instead?” Shinzan replied, “You will be enlightened by yourself later on.” Shuzan said, “I am just like this. What’s your meaning, Joza?” Shinzan remarked, “This is the administrator’s quarters, that is the cook’s quarters.” At that Shuzan bowed low.

Appreciatory Verse

Vastly clear, attachments left behind.
Elevated calm, unfettered.
Peaceful home–rare the person who arrives;
Minor ability–the level is discerned.
Capacious body and mind goes beyond right and wrong.
Right and wrong gone beyond.
Alone he stands everywhere, leaving no tracks.

Here are some photos to share. I took these today, after the storm. Winter or Spring? Who knows…

We are now well into the Spring Training Period. During this time, whatever issues that have been lying beneath the surface of our lives tend to be brought into the light. It’s our choice how we examine and deal with them. The opportunities for practice are constantly made available. Like rough stones we are rubbed together and made smooth. It’s not an easy process. For myself, I still (and perhaps always will) play the mental game of “If I could just change this, then everything would be better.” I think that’s part of being human. It can be a very useful mechanism when used skillfully. But it’s important I think to not identify with and invest too closely with that desire. Every evening we chant “desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.” I have been working with that vow and of late I see my practice as refining my desire. Being clear about what it is I want. Examining the roots and then asking “does this conform with reality?” Mapping it out, seeing what’s real. As much as possible, abandoning desires that don’t measure up with life. The impulse to move away from life as it is in exchange for another imagined life is the elephant in my meditation hall. Living in a close community, our usual avenues of escape are diminished and we are skillfully forced into confronting the issues that have arisen, head-on. There’s a lot to be learned if we are willing to stretch out of our comfort zones.

Of course the dramas of life and our rich interactions with others can become an obsession like much anything else. I remind myself to take regular pause and just gaze up at the mountain peaks, letting this notion of self and other dissolve, or at Jupiter and Venus sharing the same patch of sky. Entire worlds living side by side in perfect imperfection.

Honey, amidst the snowy fun-times

Now, don’t get me wrong. Snow is good, snow is fine, snow is what makes winter up in the mountains special and most importantly, it is what seeps in to the aquifers and allows us to maintain our supply of water. Snow is a gift of the most beautiful sort. Problem is, snow does not book in advance. Snow does not fill out an event application form and mail in a deposit for $50 so we can get the plow gassed up and ready. In short, snow can be a nuisance due to its sheer lack of concern for when and how it comes to us.

I am working on a few projects that I had hoped to have made a certain amount of progress on before the Spring Training Period starts. One of the projects is an online store so that we can make available all the fantastic items we have for sale in our gift store to the public at large. Soon you will be able to buy the latest Yokoji shirt from the comfort of your own home. Imagine. Am I going to have the store up and running by the end of this week? Definitely not. Would the store be up and running if I had not spent a whole week dealing with snow? Possibly. But, does this matter? In the grand scheme of things, beyond the inexhaustible desire to check off items from to-do lists, does this delay have any bearing on life as lived by me, you and all the others in this vast world? In a word, no.

As a fledgling web designer, I spend a lot of my free time working on design projects and learning how to improve my skills via books, blogs etc. One of the popular design ideas that is doing the rounds at the moment is responsive design. Responsive design is a way of approaching web design that is device-agnostic. Ever noticed that a website that looks great on your laptop is very hard to use on your smart phone without a lot of zooming and scanning? Responsive design promotes a series of methods that allows the website to behave differently depending on what size screen you are using to view it. Content is scaled and sometimes rearranged to make the site easy to navigate and view. The site is optimized for a variety of possible conditions. This is a dramatic departure from the overarching design strategy of recent history, in which sites have fixed widths and are completely fixed and static.

Why am I telling you this? Responsive web design is based on not knowing. Not knowing how or on what your website will be viewed. It is a philosophy of future-proofing, of preparedness. It is a method of building in an appropriate response to an as of yet undefined situation.

In case 14 of the Blue Cliff Record, a monk asks Ummon, “What are the whole lifetime’s teachings?”, to which Ummon replied, “One teaching in response.” What is this one teaching? How can it span a whole lifetime? When it snows, whatever my personal agenda may be, I deal with the snow. WE deal with the snow, because we are a community and we work together. When it is training period, we follow the schedule and do the sesshin and we do that together, too. To be responsive, to be able to go with the flow of life, when it is appropriate, is something that can be hard to do. But, trying to go against it is even harder. Let’s all go into the next three months of training together and take, and work with, what may come. And the challenge for me, and perhaps for you, is to do it gladly.

A dog can only play in the snow for so long.

This is my first week back in the schedule since returning from a two week trip to Kauai to see my son Dylan. I’ve realized that such transitional times deserve particularly careful study for me. I greatly value (and highly recommend should the opportunity arise for you) a sustained period of residence at Yokoji. There is much power in simply staying put. On the other hand, a trip away “into the world” is in itself a wonderful opportunity to test the functioning of realization in new activities. I think it’s important to witness how our practice manifests in very different environments and circumstances.

This past week I noticed upon returning to the training center that my mind was stirred up and busy. I felt very grateful for the simple act of entering the Buddha Hall. In allowing the body to take the posture and the mind to rest in this place, we develop the space to let things be as they are. My impulse tends to be to try move away from so-called negative feelings and to attach to pleasurable feelings. Good old attachment and aversion! No change there then and just part of being human. The challenge that I’m working with is in being awake and aware to whatever is arising without reacting in a knee jerk fashion or going off on automatic. Trusting in not-knowing. I find that if I trust this place irrespective of how I regard it, then naturally the way forward becomes clear with time. Practice, practice, practice. See things as they are.

The next area of interest to me with this process is in studying cause and effect. Looking at time, person, place and amount, then acting in accordance with reality.

Webster’s definition: reality: the quality or state of being real.

Not for some desired result based on my plan for world domination I hope. In studying the self we begin to see what a huge responsibility our life is and how each interaction has great effects on those around us. I say those around us because my major points of difficulty tend to arise with other people. Trees and rocks and I tend to get along just fine.

I’m excited to be back at Yokoji. I’m more than grateful to practice a way not based on schemes or inflexible belief systems. The longer I live here – indeed the longer I live anywhere – I feel I understand my life less and less. By that I mean understand cognitively. Yet dwelling here in this unknown miraculous place, we stand always at the fulcrum. Always the place of power and openness is at hand. It might just not look like how we would like it to be. As we move towards the end of Winter Interim, another Training Period is almost upon us. I look forward to the schedule heating up. On an immediate level, I look forward to the Practice House heating up as well. It’s cold today! Thank you for reading.

Jokai

For me, when I was drawn to Zen practice, it was because I had an idea that meditation might help me. There was nothing drastically wrong, just a general feeling of unease that permeated a number of my waking hours. I had made previous attempts at self-medication with books from the library about meditation and how wonderful it can be, but after dabbling with a few different techniques (there are so many out there once you start digging) I would always wonder if there was a better, faster, more shiny technique that I was yet to find. What eventually got me was a poster for a Zen group in Liverpool where I lived at the time. I went that night and attended pretty much every sitting they offered for the two years or so that followed. There are few things as simple and as powerful that I have found as a daily sitting practice.

To extend the metaphor to the point of either breaking it or at least tiring it out, when I don’t sit daily, I experience definite withdrawal symptoms: slugishness, the inability to work efficiently, a loss of general Joie de vivre. In fact, I would go as far to say as I sometimes feel downright crappy when I miss more than a few days of zazen. My life starts to feel very small, like it has no breathing space and I find that I am easily swung around by the flailing whirligig that is life. I notice this more during the interim period here at Yokoji as we sit a little less so once we get to a solid two days off (Mondays and Tuesdays), if I don’t sit, I really feel it.

I’m sure there are some dangers to talking about zazen this way, but on the plus-side, it is honest. When I sit, my life becomes clearer. When I don’t sit my life is more confused and painful. It is that simple. For this reason, I am confident when I say that unless things drastically change for me, I will always maintain this practice. It is not that zazen adds something any more than it takes it away – for me it gently reveals my life as it is, as something much bigger and less me-centric than I habitually think of it.

On occasion,  I wonder why I am here (at the Zen Center, that is – the more existential version of this question is what got me here in the first place), and when it comes down to it, I think that it is because I value the way this practice helps both me and others. Sometimes I get perturbed by Zen, its complex history and forms, and I feel alienated. I find it all too easy to make these kind of distinctions which cause me to doubt what I am doing. But like anything else, the only way to really know Zen is to experience it directly and intimately, at which point it pretty much disappears. When in the midst of practice, in the midst of life, there is no zazen, or Zen or Buddha or any of it. As soon as I close that gap, then everything is fine, but a hairsbreadth difference, and well, you know the rest…

The latest addition to the Yokoji Buddha Family.

A monk asked Tozan, “When cold and heat come, how does one avoid them?”
Tozan said, “Why not go to where there is no cold or heat?”
The monk said, “How is it where there is no cold or heat?”
Tozan said, “When it’s cold, it kills you with cold; when it’s hot, it kills you with heat.”

At the moment, one of my primary concerns is trying to keep warm. I think I can speak for everyone here when I say that. That is, each person is trying to keep themselves warm, rather than each person is doing their utmost to keep me warm. That would be nice, though. I wake up in the morning and my cabin is warmer than outside, warm enough that I am able to get out of bed without cursing and warm enough to wash and dress without feeling utterly discouraged. Yet it would be hard to call it warm. I have a wood burning stove that burns out about halfway through the night and there are usually embers enough to start something in the morning without too much bother, but as a measure to conserve fuel, not to mention my precious moments of coffee-drinking before dawn zazen, I tend not to.

After a brisk walk to the Buddha Hall where I usually lament the fact that I did not not dress in even more layers, I put on my robes and take coffee to Tenshin Roshi. At this point, the temperature is in the hands of the one known as the ‘jikido’, or timekeeper. It is the responsibility of the jikido to keep the fire going in the study hall which spreads the warmth to the Buddha Hall, kitchen and dokusan room, where Tenshin Roshi takes his coffee before zazen. I have found that you can tell a lot about someone by the way they handle the study hall fire. Some people master it, keeping the entire area warm and temperate during their week or two long stint as jikido. Some people fluctuate between too hot and too cold, never quite syncing with the nature of the fire. Other people never get the room warm enough, so the floor, walls and ceiling are perpetually cold and the heat seems to be always losing an ongoing battle. Others claim the fire is inadequate to heat the entire space, that it simply can’t be done. I’ve been in the Buddha Hall in the heart of winter when it is freezing cold outside and you could be in short sleeves inside, so this is experientially not the case. There are only a few variables to deal with – the type of wood you burn, when and how much you put in and how to deal with the air vents that draw more oxygen in to the fire. For me, the fire tells you everything you need to know if you just pay attention to it. Unless there is a feeling of sympatico, it just won’t burn well. Unless there is enough of a desire to take care of the temperature of the Hall and those in it, it doesn’t happen.

I remember when I was at art school, a sentiment attributed to the head of sculpture, Brian Catling, was that time can be bent. I think this was used in response to those who claimed they hadn’t had time to finish, or to work on their current project. I really didn’t appreciate this at the time. It seemed to undermine what was otherwise a very valid and useful excuse. Time can be bent. How is that? I have found that when I really want to get something done, it gets done. I can’t think of a single time when that hasn’t been the case. I’m talking on the level of personal goals here, rather than shots at changing the world overnight. As Tenshin Roshi often says, it may not happen as you think it will or want it to, but it will happen. There is always a cost, but with determination in place, time can be bent, and it will get done. I often find that when I don’t get things done, I have to begrudgingly admit to myself that I simply didn’t want it bad enough, I didn’t pay enough attention, I didn’t give enough of myself to what was at hand. That is one of the most beautiful lessons that I have learned here: it can be done if I am willing to pay the price. The fact of the matter is, however, I’m not always willing to pay the price. I see this in myself and others. I know this is where I fall down as a practitioner and I guess it is a trait of human being – I can be clear on what I want but I’m a lot less clear on how much effort I’m willing to put in to it and why that is the case. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way and it is all a matter of degree – what I consider effort may be considered laziness by someone else, and vice versa. But at least I know that if and when I really do want to do something, above all else, then there is nothing standing in my way. Apart from all the time and effort that is necessary to bring it into being, of course. Although, as with hot and cold, there is only one place where time and effort don’t exist and it is exactly this place that things get done.

Fire and Ice

This transition in training schedule often presents some fairly classic challenges. On the one hand it’s refreshing to have more unstructured time. On the other hand, less zazen and dokusan and more work time places greater responsibility on each individual to guard and continue the quality of their own practice. This can be especially true of the two hosan (rest) days.

For me personally, I’ve been working with the impulse to move, particularly during my rest time. There has been a nagging intellectual doubt that maybe I don’t have quite enough. That this isn’t quite enough. I don’t literally mean “move”, like, move to… say Oklahoma (though come to think of it Hawaii would probably win out – no offence Oklahoma). But rather the impulse to move from the experience of my life in the present moment. Once I reach a point where everything is basically taken care of, what then? In some ways, it’s easier for me to practice in the more intense training periods simply because I’m so very busy. I’m a part of a larger whole and my roles are obvious. Take away all the things I have to do immediately, and I’m left with the personal responsibility and choice as to how to manifest my life. Not such a bad problem to have I think, but I have great capacity to mess that up if I follow old impulses.  When I finally (fingers proverbially crossed, I’m typing) quit smoking several months ago, I read that the craving for a cigarette only lasts about 5 to 7 minutes max. That little statistic really helped me quit. I thought to myself, “I can endure this for 7 minutes”. Recently, I’ve been applying this technique to my other impulses. Those thoughts that creep in and tempt me to choose another reality over this one. When I can sit still in those moments and just observe my patterns arise, then like the craving for nicotine, they tend to disappear without my engagement with them. Here’s an example of a classic ho-hum Jokai monologue: “hmm…I’m bored. Got some work to do but nothing pressing….maybe I’ll drive to Idyllwild and do some online work in the coffee shop….hmm…don’t really feel like driving…”.

At these times when I’m awake and aware to what’s going on, I’m practicing with not feeding these thought trails, but rather asking “what’s wrong with this?” Invariably, there is nothing wrong at all and I can disappear in the sunlight coming through the window and the warmth of the Practice House fire.

Speaking of fires, my closest insentient (to my knowledge at least) friend this Interim period is our awesome Study Hall fire – pictured above. It’s been coooold lately and I truly appreciate arriving for pre-dawn zazen, grabbing a cup of coffee (favorite nickname: liquid samadhi) and kicking back for a while to warm the bones. There’s something so ancient and comforting about making a fire. Throwing another log on and staring into those orange depths I feel one with my cro-magnon ancestors.

It is once again a truly beautiful day today. The sun continues to shine without my asking it to and wanting nothing in return. I want to express my gratitude for that and for this.

Jokai

The guys putting up the new panels

A big thanks is owed to Ambassador Energy of Murrieta. I have been working with Catherine, the off-grid specialist from Ambassador, over the past months getting everything planned and executed. She was paid for a single days work over the whole project but she certainly put in much more, not to mention 2 full days of installation. Our alliance with Ambassador started at the beginning of the year when Kelly and Steve, the President and CEO of Ambassador respectively, came to Yokoji for the Sunday program. I found out what they did for a living and we went on a tour of the panels and power shed and they expressed and interest to help in the future. I called on them in the Summer to see if they could help us to plan and install an upgrade to our existing system and they did so, in the form of free expertise and heavily discounted equipment. We got a great deal of bang for our buck thanks to Ambassador. Catherine also wrangled some volunteers from Intercoast in Riverside, a school that trains electricians and has a good working relationship with Ambassador. We had eight volunteers helping with the install yesterday, a mixture of professional electricians, teachers and students. I dread to think what the cost of all the labor would have been if they hadn’t been kind enough to volunteer for the project. It is rare to have an off-grid project of this size, it turns out, so the experience gained has real value to the students who are learning how to install solar for both off-grid and grid-tie applications. I’d also like to thank Dan Puleo who has only been to Yokoji a few times, and most of them were to volunteer and lend his experience as a residential construction supervisor. Dan helped me prepare the racks for the panels as well as donating some of the angle iron that we used.

So all in all, the project is near a close and it is a happy ending in the making thus far. Thank you to everyone who contributed this year through the fund-raising drive. You guys made this possible and have really benefited Yokoji by doing so. Feel free to come up and charge your ipod on a sunny day to share and revel in the abundance of renewable power. No hair driers, though! We still have to be conservative with power and invest carefully where possible. Off-grid is still off-grid, however many solar panels there are.

Kaigen and Tenshin Roshi holding the Inka document which Tenshin Roshi read out.

In other news (and perhaps more importantly, but as you may notice I have a strong bias toward whatever project I have recently been working on), today Tenshin Roshi gave Kaigen Roshi (formerly Sensei) the final seal of approval as a Zen teacer, or Inka. Kaigen is now known as Kaigen Roshi (Roshi signifies someone who has received the final seal of approval from their teacher in our mixed Soto and Rinzai tradition). Kaigen Roshi and Jikyo Roshi (who are husband and wife) run the Three Treasures Zen Community in San Diego. What this all means is that Tenshin Roshi feels that Kaigen Roshi is fully independent and can stand alone without his support as a Zen Teacher, and today was a public recognition of that fact. This is the first time that Tenshin Roshi has given this recognition to one of his successors. It was a moving ceremony and Kaigen and Jikyo responded to questions from the people who had gathered to witness the event. It was great to meet some of the Three Treasures Community who came up to take part and I hope we may see some of them again.