scandals

[Daitetsu]

Hi Jundo,

Timo, I put this into Practice today for our Zazenkai, if you look about 2 minutes from the start.

That was awesome (also wrote an answer at the Zazenkai thread), I was there "live"...
I couldn't believe it - I love unconventional methods!
I'm just glad you didn't burn anything...

I guess we must be very careful what we say here - who knows what else you'll put into practice?

Gassho,

Timo

[Jundo]

Hi Jundo,


I totally agree with you.
Actually, it depends on how we approach it - a Buddha statue can be both something holy and something ordinary. The same holds true for my vacuum cleaner or any dust particle it removes.
While these don't have a commonly accepted religious meaning I can give them the meaning when I approach them in a certain manner.

It is like TNH's Gatha I use when I wash the dishes:

Washing the dishes
is like bathing a baby Buddha.
The profane is the sacred.
Everyday mind is Buddha's mind.

Gassho,

Timo

Timo, I put this into Practice today for our Zazenkai, if you look about 2 minutes from the start.

[Rich]

The following, published yesterday, is long but required reading for any serious Zen person.

http://sweepingzen.com/some-reflections-on-rinzai-ji-by-giko-david-rubin/

Gassho, Jundo[/I]

Very credible and compelling narrative. Wouldn't be surprised if his dharma heir is announced and he is retired to the farm.

[Ed]

I met Sasaki Roshi in 1980, I think. It was a three day sesshin and my first time ever sitting formally and doing dokusan. He gave me a koan I still keep with me and think it often. It was training koan, nothing heavy. He was such an imposing presence sitting there. Never forgot that either.

At the end of the last day sitting I was asked to drive him and his wife to visit a student of his in South Miami, not far. The student had build a tea house in the garden and wanted Roshi to service a tea ceremony. It was Roshi, his student and his wife and little old me there in that simple and powerful little bamboo and palm hut.

I treasure the memory and can be there at will, even these many years since. His wife did the ceremony. Her grace lifting the bamboo ladle and placing it just so and handling the tea spoon and green tea powder.....the hot water from the fire pit......the turning of the cup this way and then the opposite direction. Roshi in zazen, immutable. The student, a large martial arts type immovable. Me taking it all in, present.

Never saw Roshi again but he is still with me in that hut. That I keep, the rest I let go. Yet...

[Matt]

When reading all of the back and forth going on over the scandals - and here I'm referring primarily to Sweeping Zen and not this particular discussion thread - I've felt a lack of what I would call 'loving-kindness' in the correspondence. Yes, I know that zen folk are still human. Their feelings can be hurt. They can react defensively.

But the tone of much of that discussion has bothered me. I would hope that, even when we disagree with others, that we would try and understand where the other person is coming from and respond in a compassionate manner, even when we disagree about such serious issues. I would hope that this would be especially true for those who are zen leaders.

I am encouraged by Jundo's words: ''And folks newer to Zen should not be discouraged by such things. For every Teacher out there with a shadow, there are dozens and dozens of Zen teachers I know who are gentle, caring, dedicated, sincere men or women who would not hurt a fly. A few bad apples (or good apples with blemish here or there) do not ruin the whole orchard."

Gassho,
Matt

[RichardH]

First ordained sangha is ordained sangha,
then ordained sangha is not ordained sangha
then ordained sangha is ordained sangha,


When ordained sangha is not ordained sangha, it is so for all, it is not selective...as in mountains but not rivers. It is mountains and rivers. It is all burned up in the kalpa fire (or however it is said). The "Absolute" can only be invoked from a hidden position, a hidden partiality. It is the propaganda of uncooked practice. So I can only pass on that, and just keep chewing grass. While Bowing to ordained sangha.

impatient, runny nosed, Gassho, kojip

[ZenHarmony]

...The maple tree outside my window is a marvelous teacher to me - it doesn't wear an Okesa - does that delegitimize it? ... We depend on experienced teachers and "good friends" in practice to help us stay on track and determine whether or not our practice is authentic and consistent with the teachings....both from the past and present. ... I find the intramural squabbling in the Zen community - picking and choosing - to be foolish and a waste of time. Sit, live and love. Practice with a sangha. Follow your heart. The rest is beyond our control.

Exactly.



Lisa

[Daitetsu]

Hi Jundo,

Of course, I usually bow down to Buddha Statues endless times more than I burn them. However, sometimes it is fine to burn them, and one should never be attached. A Buddha Statue is also a piece of wood, nothing special. However, a Buddha Statue is also a reMINDer and symbol and embodiment of these Teachings. So, while not attached, I bow down and do embrace fully and honor the meaning in my heart. So it is with wearing Robes.

I totally agree with you.
Actually, it depends on how we approach it - a Buddha statue can be both something holy and something ordinary. The same holds true for my vacuum cleaner or any dust particle it removes.
While these don't have a commonly accepted religious meaning I can give them the meaning when I approach them in a certain manner.

It is like TNH's Gatha I use when I wash the dishes:

Washing the dishes
is like bathing a baby Buddha.
The profane is the sacred.
Everyday mind is Buddha's mind.

Gassho,

Timo

[Myozan Kodo]

Yes. A great post Yugen. Thank you.

Taigu, is Zen Zen without the Okesa? And I don't mean here the deeper meaning of this reality which is stitched together.

Gassho,
Myozan

[Taigu]

Yes Yugen, it is very well expressed and pretty close to what I deeply feel.
Originally, we see the universe as a kesa. And we practice sewing one too.
There is room for siiting with or without a kesa, even wihout one, the okesa of space is wrapping peoples body.

Our tradition is simple.

There is room for punk Zen and room for okesa Zen.


Gassho


Taigu

"There's nothing hardcore, cool, or rebellious, about Zen. It's a very old, traditional, and demanding practice..."

Why does it have to be one or the other? I would agree with both statements. Zen is a very old and demanding practice. It has migrated across continents through the hundreds and thousands of years.... Shikantaza is also very demanding..... indeed, it gets harder the more time you spend on the cushion..... as far as being rebellious goes, from a historical perspective Chinese emperors and rulers over the centuries alternatively co-opted, bought into, and attempted to eradicate Chan/Zen Buddhism because of its potential to challenge centralized authority. The same was true in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I am sure more knowledgeable folks here than me will indicate this was the case much earlier as well.

Shikantaza can be very hardcore as well - it is not new age meditation - to be alone with a zafu and your own thoughts is tough stuff and requires enormous discipline. To sit and face a blank wall for day after day, year after year, when it is easier to watch TV, go shopping, or eat Twinkies is pretty hardcore in my mind.

From a cultural perspective in the United States, the notion of Zen as rebellious and cool is a cultural one - may have started with Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg and colleagues of their generation - thought of as counterculture and anti-establishment.... this is somewhat unfortunate as the more I read Snyder's work I like what he has to say. It is thoughtful and he is very close to our own lineage's emphasis on dissolving the boundaries between lay and clerical/monastic practice. He very much advocates practicing "out in the world." Just as Koans have been used to disrupt conventional thought processes there have been practitioners (aren't we all teachers?) who have thought to challenge the status quo by utilising techniques, commentary, and fora that are considered "in your face," "improper" or not conventional (Brad?). The maple tree outside my window is a marvelous teacher to me - it doesn't wear an Okesa - does that delegitimize it? In my mind this is the only way our practice is advanced, and prevents becoming arteriosclerotic. More power to Brad, as far as I am concerned. I may not always agree with what he says, but he challenges our thinking and practice. The truth is that Zen takes on the character of the cultures and society it migrates into - it changed when it migrated from China to Japan, and it is changing as develops in the United States and Europe - it takes on the flavors of the things it is mixed with. We depend on experienced teachers and "good friends" in practice to help us stay on track and determine whether or not our practice is authentic and consistent with the teachings....both from the past and present. I have to be careful with the word tradition because that can become a euphemism for rejecting change or evolution. There are many varieties of Zen practice, and the US is not without those who differ significantly as to what constitutes Zen practice. I find the intramural squabbling in the Zen community - picking and choosing - to be foolish and a waste of time. Sit, live and love. Practice with a sangha. Follow your heart. The rest is beyond our control.

Deep bows,
Yugen

This was a wonderful post Yugen, thank you, I enjoyed that very much.

Gassho
Michael

[Jundo]

Regarding our ethics committee, maybe we should have a woman or two on board for gender balance? ...

Thanks for the link.
Gassho
Myozan

Excellent suggestion.

And, although we see beyond and through-and-through all mental divisions of male, female, gay, straight, transgender and everything beyond ... I would like to see soon more novice priests-in-training of the female persuasion and such.

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

"There's nothing hardcore, cool, or rebellious, about Zen. It's a very old, traditional, and demanding practice..."

Why does it have to be one or the other? I would agree with both statements. Zen is a very old and demanding practice. It has migrated across continents through the hundreds and thousands of years.... Shikantaza is also very demanding..... indeed, it gets harder the more time you spend on the cushion..... as far as being rebellious goes, from a historical perspective Chinese emperors and rulers over the centuries alternatively co-opted, bought into, and attempted to eradicate Chan/Zen Buddhism because of its potential to challenge centralized authority. The same was true in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I am sure more knowledgeable folks here than me will indicate this was the case much earlier as well.

Shikantaza can be very hardcore as well - it is not new age meditation - to be alone with a zafu and your own thoughts is tough stuff and requires enormous discipline. To sit and face a blank wall for day after day, year after year, when it is easier to watch TV, go shopping, or eat Twinkies is pretty hardcore in my mind.

From a cultural perspective in the United States, the notion of Zen as rebellious and cool is a cultural one - may have started with Gary Snyder and Alan Ginsberg and colleagues of their generation - thought of as counterculture and anti-establishment.... this is somewhat unfortunate as the more I read Snyder's work I like what he has to say. It is thoughtful and he is very close to our own lineage's emphasis on dissolving the boundaries between lay and clerical/monastic practice. He very much advocates practicing "out in the world." Just as Koans have been used to disrupt conventional thought processes there have been practitioners (aren't we all teachers?) who have thought to challenge the status quo by utilising techniques, commentary, and fora that are considered "in your face," "improper" or not conventional (Brad?). The maple tree outside my window is a marvelous teacher to me - it doesn't wear an Okesa - does that delegitimize it? In my mind this is the only way our practice is advanced, and prevents becoming arteriosclerotic. More power to Brad, as far as I am concerned. I may not always agree with what he says, but he challenges our thinking and practice. The truth is that Zen takes on the character of the cultures and society it migrates into - it changed when it migrated from China to Japan, and it is changing as develops in the United States and Europe - it takes on the flavors of the things it is mixed with. We depend on experienced teachers and "good friends" in practice to help us stay on track and determine whether or not our practice is authentic and consistent with the teachings....both from the past and present. I have to be careful with the word tradition because that can become a euphemism for rejecting change or evolution. There are many varieties of Zen practice, and the US is not without those who differ significantly as to what constitutes Zen practice. I find the intramural squabbling in the Zen community - picking and choosing - to be foolish and a waste of time. Sit, live and love. Practice with a sangha. Follow your heart. The rest is beyond our control.

Deep bows,
Yugen

Thank you, Yugen, this speaks my heart too.

Throughout its history, Zen has been rebellious and iconoclastic, but also conservative and honoring of Tradition ... and usually it was the same people who were both at once. For all his supposed sexual and moral freedom, Ikkyu has also been shown by historians to be quite the stick in the mud and traditionalist in other ways. There is a time for each. Let's manifest "Rebel-Non-Rebel" ... both bowing down and burning the wooden Buddha statue when the time is right (Ikkyu would bow down to statues, but also reportedly pissed on one he was asked to consecrate). I find Brad ... so "straight edge", conservative about drink, drugs and certainly no "seducer of women" ... to be such a Rebel-Non-Rebel. (Me too, Taigu too!).

I wrote this to and about Brad regarding being "clergy" ... just my feeling ...

Our whole Lineage [through Niwa, the Abbot of Eiheiji and Nishijima, the priest-working man he ordained] is very much about softening and knocking down all the traditional barriers in Buddhism between “Ordained Clergy” “Lay Householders” “Male” and “Female”. I would disagree with him about whether we are “clergy”, because we function in that role in my eyes … like someone is a “bus driver” when they drive a bus on a regular basis. [Beyond one having undergone the rituals of "Home Leaving" Ordination and "Dharma Transmission"], if one is writing books about Zen, is leading sittings and writing advice columns on peoples’ personal issues in a major Buddhist magazine [like Tricycle, as Brad is], then one would be functioning as “clergy”. But that is just my view, and need not be Brad’s view and, for what it is worth, I support it. Brad sometimes describes himself more as an “artist” or “Zen troubadour” or “spiritual entertainer”, the same label Alan Watts used to describe himself, and Brad may actually be a more effective voice of the Dharma in such role than leading a typical Zen Group or preaching to the same choir as all the other Zen folks.

More here on Ikkyu ... the surprisingly sometimes conservative rebel ...

His life grew progressively more unconventional with time, just the opposite of most. Beginning as a classicist in the finest Kyoto tradition, he had gone on to become a spiritual recluse in the mountains under a harsh meditation master. After all this training he then took the road, becoming a wandering monk in the traditional T'ang mode.

Well, almost in the traditional mode. He seemed to wander into brothels and wine shops almost as often as into Zen temples. He consorted with high and low, merchant and commoner, male and female. Our record of these explorations, both geographic and social, is in his writings, particularly his poetry. He also harbored a vendetta against the complacency and corruption of Japanese Zen and its masters, particularly the new abbot of Daitoku-ji, an older man named Yoso who had once been a fellow disciple of his beloved Kaso.

When Ikkyu was forty-six he was invited by Yoso to head a subtemple in the Daitoku-ji compound. He accepted, much to the delight of his admirers, who began bringing the temple donations in gratitude. However, after only ten days Ikkyu concluded that Daitoku-ji too had become more concerned with ceremony than with the preservation of Zen, and he wrote a famous protest poem as a parting gesture—claiming he could find more of Zen in the meat, drink, and sex traditionally forbidden Buddhists.

For ten days in this temple my mind's been in turmoil,
My feet are entangled in endless red tape.
If some day you get around to looking for me,
Try the fish-shop, the wine parlor, or the brothel.17

Ikkyu's attack on the commercialization of Zen was not without cause. The scholar Jan Covell observes that in Ikkyu's time, "Rinzai Zen had sunk to a low point and enlightenment was 'sold,' particularly by those temples associated with the Shogunate. Zen temples also made money in sake-brewing and through usury. In the mid-fifteenth century one Zen temple, Shokoku-ji, furnished all the advisers to the Shogunate's government and received most of the bribes. The imperial-sanctioned temple of Daitoku-ji was only on the fringe of this corruption, but Ikkyu felt he could not criticize it enough."18

... Ikkyu used his poetry (later collected as the "Crazy Cloud Poems" or Kyoun-shu) as a means of expressing his enlightenment, as well as his criticism of the establishment. It also, as often as not, celebrated sensual over spiritual pleasures. ... When Ikkyu was in his seventies, during the disastrous civil conflict known as the Onin war, he had a love affair with a forty-year-old temple attendant named Mori. On languid afternoons she would play the Japanese koto or harp and he the wistful-sounding shakuhachi, a long bamboo flute sometimes carried by monks as a weapon. This late-life love affair occasioned a number of erotic poems, including one that claims her restoration of his virility (called by the Chinese euphemism "jade stalk") cheered his disciples.

How is my hand like Mori's hand?
Self confidence is the vassal, Freedom the master.
When I am ill she cures the jade stalk
And brings joy back to my followers.22

Ironically, the real-life Ikkyu spent his twilight years restoring Daitoku-ji after its destruction (along with the rest of Kyoto) from the ten-year Onin war (1467-77), by taking over the temple and using his contacts in the merchant community to raise funds. He had over a hundred disciples at this time, a popularity that saddened him since earlier (and, he thought, more deserving) masters had had many fewer followers. Thus in the last decade of his life he finally exchanged his straw sandals and reed hat for the robes of a prestigious abbot over a major monastery. His own ambivalence on this he confessed in a poem:

Fifty years a rustic wanderer,
Now mortified in purple robes.26

From: The Zen Experience by Thomas Hoover

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34325/34325-h/34325-h.htm

By the way, Barbara O'brien over at "About Buddhism" has what I feel is a very fair assessment of Brad and what he is saying on teacher-student sexual relationships ...

http://buddhism.about.com/b/2012/12/13/when-teachers-disagree.htm

Gassho, J

[Jakudo]

Spot on Yugen, I'm tired of the bickering that goes on....just sit. I have met Brad and he was nothing like his writing style would suggest. Also when I was practising without a teacher I would occasionally e mail Brad with questions about practice and he always got back to me with good advice and I am grateful for that. All our life is our temple, and everything can be our teacher.

[Myozan Kodo]

As a priest-in-training here, you are expected to uphold them and be bound by them. You were, of course, familiar with our ethics guidelines here at Treeleaf before today I hope.

Gassho, Jundo

Yes. I was looking into the SZBA guidelines. I know we have guidelines. An ethics committee. I was interested in any concerted effort at offering guidelines to the wider Soto Zen world in the west. I am not ignorant of our ethical guidelines and our five-man committee.

Regarding our ethics committee, maybe we should have a woman or two on board for gender balance?

Thanks for the link.
Gassho
Myozan