with Michael Hofmann at the Santa Rosa Creek Zen Center

June 15, 2013 11am to 4:30pm 

In this workshop we will explore sumi-e, traditional Japanese brush painting using ground ink.  After learning a little about the ink and brushes, there will be a variety of themes for individual exploration.  Employing a playful approach, we’ll discover the joy of expressive and spontaneous brushwork.  For all levels of experience.

Michael Hofmann’s artistic odyssey began in 1971 with a cryptic beckoning from a Japanese Zen monk who visited the University of Santa Barbara where Michael was majoring in Asian Studies and dabbling in sculpture. After graduating in ’72, he set out for Kyoto to see what this monk and the Fates had in mind. The monk welcomed him warmly the day he arrived and said (essentially), “Do I have a teacher for you!” Three days later, Michael was sitting at the feet of Jikihara Gyokusei, Zen priest and legendary sumi-e (traditional ink painting) master, who was to become his life-long guru, mentor and friend.

After years of study as Jikihara’s uchi deshi (live-in apprentice), Michael mastered all the techniques of classical and Zen sumi-e painting and began to incorporate other media into his increasingly distinctive style. During his frequent journeys to Europe and North America to exhibit his works and teach sumi-e, he actively seeks recently been working cooperative opportunites with artists in other fields. Though he has had the frequent pleasure of collaborating with distinguished potters, collage artists, poets and print makers, his best loved tools are still brush and paper. 

Michael now lives in the North Bay and is a student of meditation and koans at Pacific Zen Institute.

Cost $45.00 + $5.00 materials = $50.00

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Scholarships available if you need one, just ask.

For more information or to ask for a scholarship contact the registrar for this event oneday@pacificzen.org

The post Zen and Ink: Sumi-e Painting appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

A Day with John Tarrant, Roshi
June 22, 2013 – 12pm to 5pm
Rockridge Meditation Community

Buddhist meditation is something to do, not to believe, so the measure of it is always related to what is happening to your mind and your life.

It is a practice—something you do over and over again, as in, “I’m practicing the guitar” or “I’m practicing my computer game.”

If you practice meditation in this regular way, Buddhism has a mysterious and unpredictable healing power. By mysterious, I mean that while the effect of meditation is more or less as advertised, you are on a journey that does not reveal all its features at once, and even the destination is uncertain. And by unpredictable, I mean that surprise is one of the consequences of meditation. You arrive at places you never intended to reach and didn’t know existed. The first thing that’s surprising is that meditation changes you, and so after a while you are not the same person who set off.

     - John Tarrant

This one-day retreat consists of Zen meditation, teachings, and conversation.

Price: $65

Location:
Rockridge Meditation Community
5463 College Avenue
Oakland, Ca 94618

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The post Enlightenment is Intimacy appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

with Thaisa Frank at the Rockridge Meditation Community

June 1st, 12:30 PM to 4:30 PM

A Workshop for People who like Fiction, Poetry and Language. It’s been said that bad writers borrow and good writers steal. What is often meant is that good writers steal and transform what they have learned into their own voice.

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However there is another, perhaps more important, way that good writers steal. They steal by using language to reveal the direct experience of the thing itself, the thing that is there whether or not we have a word for it.

Ryokan wrote:

The thief left it behind–    

the moon At the window–

In this poem, Ryokan’s most famous,  there is a hidden thief. That thief is Ryokan. One might say he stole the word “moon” and used it in a way that allows us to see that thing in the sky that persists without a name.  He makes the moon intimate, direct. He allows us to see the moon at the window. One might say, then, that all writers work with a dilemma-koan—the dilemma of using language to embrace what is direct and unnamable.

During this workshop we will concentrate on using language to create direct experience in poetry and fiction and in surprising journals of one’s daily life.  We’ll also work also work with voice—who you are and how you express that artistically. And finally with imagination—daring imagination that shatters the latticework of language and rearranges it.

Please bring one object for all of us to look at and to contemplate.

Be prepared to be surprised.

-Thaisa

We are pleased to announce that Rockridge Meditation Community will be hosting a writing workshop with Thaisa Frank, a PZI senior student and author. This event is a fundraiser for the Rockridge Meditation Community. About Thaisa: “I’ve published six books. The last was Enchantment in 2012 and the previous one Heidegger’s Glasses, 2010. I’ve previously been a psychotherapist, a certified teacher of the Enneagram,  and now teach writing in graduate programs. (I’ve written one non-fiction book about the writer’s voice.)  From the time I was eighteen, I’ve been drawn to Zen.  At first I just wanted to spend time with silence, one of the writer’s best friends. Later, when I read koans, I heard an urgent shout and the sheer sound felt like the same call I had to answer in my own work, because I often start with a title or a phrase,  and have to swim under discursive language to discover the story. Once David Weinstein asked me if meditation informed my writing, and I said of course it did because it helped me live with silence.  Then he asked me if writing informed my meditation, and I realized that it did because I spend so much time in my writing day tolerating not knowing. In a sense, Zen and writing feel the same.” About the Workshop: Please bring a pen and a notebook and a concrete object for all of us to contemplate. By nature, workshops must be spontaneous and I always lead them expecting the unexpected. Here are some of the expected things we will cover:

• Techniques for being on friendly terms with silence.
• Working with direct experience by not giving objects or experiences a name..
• Freeing the discursive mind by writing grammatical nonsense.
• Finding the “holidays” in language—those surprising accidents that occur in clusters of writing—and using them in poetry or short fiction.
• Learning to write about what you imagine you know by surprising yourself—or making the journal dangerous.
• Retelling a fairy tale as a koan or a koan as a fairy tale.
• Discovering “triggering” events—whatever it is that makes you want to write.
• Feeling free to write what is truthful to you at the time, without concern for how good it is, what it means, or whether your best friend will read it.

A lot of writing involves cultivating the paramitas (virtues) of patience, prajna (wisdom), and right action. When you leave this workshop you will have tools for being on friendly terms with silence, looking at the familiar as unfamiliar  (and the unfamiliar as familiar), trusting not to know in writing “what comes next,” and trusting in impermanence. Time: June 1st from 12:30 PM to 4:30 PM. Place: Rockridge Meditation Community 5463 College Avenue, Oakland, Ca 94618 Price: $50 This is a fundraiser for the Rockridge Meditation Community

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The post Stealing the Moon: A Writer’s Workshop appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

July 9-14, 2013 - San Rafael, California.

The two great questions of life are, “Who am I?” and “What do I want?”

One question is about our place in the universe and the other is about how to become most truly ourselves, how to show up for our own lives and take our true place.

This is a Summer Zen meditation intensive, an exploration of the koan tradition of inquiry at Santa Sabina in San Rafael, Northern California.

In Zen we are deeply interested in throwing open to question things you thought were the ground of reality. The sacred truths are usually about who we think we are and what is impossible for us, and what is a problem. The sacred truths are not true.

Examples of sacred truths are: I have to do it all myself. People will let me down. I’ll be abandoned. If I change other people will be hurt. if I stop worrying something bad will happen. Something bad can happen. I can’t really be happy. There’s something wrong with me.

We are not our thoughts. we don’t have to live in the movie set they make.

In order to be free it’s good to live in the questions, to not know long enough for the creative moment to occur.

A koan drops into the story that is already going on and begins to open other possibilities.

There is a curriculum of koan inquiry we will explore.

Meals will be cooked for you. This retreat has a particular focus on giving you the time for meditation, walking, sitting, inquiry. Everything is provided for you to to really let go into the depths.

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This retreat is held at the beautiful Santa Sabina Center.
David Weinstein and Deb Saint will also be teaching at this retreat.

PRICING

Full-Time Retreat Cost (including a stipend for the teachers)

• $350 before June 9 (a $50 Early Bird Discount)
• $400 after June 9

Full-Time Lodging

• Shared Room $585
• Single Room $705

Part-Time Cost (Includes Retreat & Lodging, Per Day)

• Shared Room $200
• Single Room $250

For more information, contact the registrar.

The post “What Is This?” – A Summer Meditation Intensive with John Tarrant appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

The true traveler has no destination
and no fixed time of arrival
—Laozi

This is the stone,
drenched with rain,
that points the way.
—Santoka

Buddhist meditation is something to do, not to believe, so the measure of it is always related to what is happening to your mind and your life. It is a practice—something you do over and over again, as in, “I’m practicing the guitar” or “I’m practicing my computer game.”

If you practice meditation in this regular way, Buddhism has a mysterious and unpredictable healing power. By mysterious, I mean that while the effect of meditation is more or less as advertised, you are on a journey that does not reveal all its features at once, and even the destination is uncertain. And by unpredictable, I mean that surprise is one of the consequences of meditation. You arrive at places you never intended to reach and didn’t know existed. The first thing that’s surprising is that meditation changes you, and so after a while you are not the same person who set off.

A lot of things happen in the long arc of a meditation practice—it’s a journey, not a plan. I took the mysterious path through the koan forest, but all of the Buddhist traditions have key discoveries in common. And you might come to some very similar roadside inns in the Vajrayana mountains and the plains of insight meditation.

So let’s look at some of the landmarks of meditation practice, some features you might notice along the way.

Escaping from the Burning House

The reasons for starting a practice are usually different from the reasons for keeping one going. When it comes to starting, any reason will do. The Buddha used the metaphor of a burning house. The idea is that people are in a house that has caught fire but they haven’t worked out what is going on yet. You want to help, so you tell them anything that will get them out of the house. You offer a cover story, “Oh look, there’s Britney Spears, half dressed, with her paparazzi” or “Come and listen to my new iPod; it’s awesome.” When you begin meditation these ploys get you out of the burning house, at least for the moment.

Usually we start for reasons that are acceptable in a given culture. In North America we like to be told that a method will improve us in some way. I often teach in and sometimes do research in medical environments and in medical schools. Physicians are open to meditation because they are interested in evidence-based techniques for healing. In medical settings, meditation is called things like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, MBSR for short. Another reason for taking up practice might be that meditation changes the pathways in the brain. While most conversations and talk therapy might involve the neocortex, the idea here is that meditation gets down to the limbic brain, where stories about trauma are stored and replayed. Meditation can weaken the grip of such stories. It also seems to enhance the immune response, to manage pain, and to shorten recovery time from surgery. Also, if you are a doctor or a nurse or an executive, then meditation probably makes you better at what you do.

These are all good reasons to begin meditation. Permanent escape from the flames is another matter; that’s where continuing practice comes in. Once you are on the journey, practicing every day, these reasons will continue to be solid, but some stranger, larger change occurs—your reasons will alter.

Reasons that get you out of the burning house all offer something positive. They offer a view about reality, saying things are thus. But those reasons probably won’t keep you practicing. What keeps you from rushing back into the burning house is the discoveries that you make. You become interested in your inner life, you notice the nature of the mind, and you start experiencing freedom.

My personal version of the burning house was this: I had a sense that there were many off-the-shelf solutions to being human. They were career paths or entertainments that were advertised as offering happiness. Trying to make them work without quite believing in them was its own little piece of hell. Meditation looked like something that might work; perhaps because it meant not doing things. That was enormously appealing. I was thrilled with the discovery that I could sit still, shut up, and be happy. Waving my arms about, reading the great texts, having long conversations about important matters—all these had not led to understanding or happiness. Not doing those things seemed worth a shot.

It Feels So Good When It Stops

There can be a blessing over early stages of practice—life seems spacious, and very possible. You can hear sounds differently, as if a bird call is inside you or the wind in the trees is meant just for you. The idea of not doing is a crucial one, and when you get to it  you have stepped outside the burning house. Not doing begins with the sense that the journey is enough right now and striving isn’t needed. Tasks that were boring drudgery, such as scrubbing pots, are suddenly interesting because you are not trying to hold off from them and your own mind has become interesting no matter what it is doing. Things start to flow, and it’s amazing how people who were irritating become less so as a result of your meditation. Moreover, you have a sense of being on the real journey at last, which might bring tears to your eyes. It is as if after many lifetimes you have found a path.

Practice Sets in like Weather

photo by Roger Jordan

When practice sets in, rather the way weather does, there can be a lot of boredom and feeling clueless, so that cluelessness or plainness is something that always needs to be taken into account. There is a strong temptation to make meditation into something good that you do, or something that makes you special. But to add striving and competence back into the equation means taking meditation back into the burning house. You are learning to ride the bicycle, and the harder you try the more you wobble. This period is a kind of purification, or initiation ordeal. One way to be during this part of the journey is not to know things, since anything you decide that you know will put you off balance. During this time, as well as experiencing struggle and disorientation, I also detected an undercurrent that was independent of my assessments. Noticing this subterranean current is the beginning of the true, deep direction of practice. It isn’t influenced by what we think or feel we need, and perhaps for that reason really does lead into a more joyful life.

Uncertainty

The core of all navigation is probably uncertainty: tolerating not knowing makes it possible to find your way. Not knowing means embracing what is not known rather than fighting with yourself over it. Since the mind always strives to know, not knowing is disorienting in a useful way. Uncertainty and not knowing teach you not to believe the stories your mind feeds you day in and day out. If you allow your own course to be mysterious, then even the hard things can become easy. This is the beginning of awakening.

Fan Noise

This is a conversation with an eighteen-year-old student at UCLA:

What is meditation about?
Well, why do you meditate?
Hmmm. Well, it wasn’t that I hate my life and must meditate, but I realized that my life wasn’t handleable without it.

It’s like a fan noise that’s there all the time, and when I meditate it’s silent. When the fan was on you didn’t hear it, because it had always been there. There was a catalyst that happened for me too. A friend who was a musician died suddenly, and the fan noise became really loud. I was alone in New York City and lonely, and didn’t even connect the stress with my friend’s death. The acute stuff is what it is obvious, but even if you deal with the acute stuff you still have that chronic background pain. It’s the chronic stuff in the background that is interesting to deal with. And if I don’t meditate, that noise gets worse—and worse.

That’s why it’s good to want a different life, to be Cinderella wanting to get out of the kitchen. If you want a different life, you might learn to stop the fan noise.

The fan noise is like the dreams you have during an afternoon nap—just below consciousness, not completely garbled but not really making sense the way waking things make sense. The thoughts accumulate and get more and more tangled, but they are not necessarily in awareness and they might never rise to the level where you could ask yourself whether they were true. Meditation turns off the fan and reinstates the silence.

What Do You Do With Your Emotions?

The UCLA student mused further about what was noise and what was not. Was her grief over the death of her friend something she wanted to let go of, or was that letting go not necessary?

Two hundred years ago, Issa wrote a haiku for his daughter. The convention in East Asia was that on New Year’s Day, you got a year older. He wrote:

Laugh, and crawl about,
from today
you are two!

Then less than a year later, when she died of smallpox, he wrote:

Autumn wind;
The red flowers
She liked to pick.

Even without fan noise, there can be heartbreak. But the most heartbreaking thing is not heartbreak; it’s avoiding heartbreak. Inside the transience of life is the thusness of everything, of the tree with forty crows on it in winter, the sound of death-metal drums from the kids in the barn, and the feeling of sadness when you lose someone. A lot of our suffering is resistance to the life of feeling. If you surrender, you are surrendering to what is really going on. This is just to notice that nothing beyond your life is more important than your life.

Obstacles can be the gate. If your diagnosis is cancer or you lose people you love, there is no alternative but surrender. You can’t rewind to yesterday when you were innocent. Meditation at such a moment might not take you back to the surface; it might take you down and through. Getting more emotional might be indicated; falling apart might happen. The practice is what tows you through. It doesn’t take the rough crossing away from you but it gives you a degree of safety in the passage.

Once when I lost a friend, I realized that I was weeping since my hands were wet. I was giving a talk at the time, being wise and all that, and it was a revelation—I couldn’t trust myself not to weep in public. I also couldn’t trust myself to sleep at night, either. At a time like that we have to surrender. We are facing something vast and, really, we have always known that we would have to face it. It is an enormous, shaggy beast blocking the way. And there is something exhilarating about the inevitable when at last it arrives; awakening is not a choice or a matter of technique anymore, it’s the only place left. The huge animal rolls over us, and suddenly we find that we are riding on its back. It has become a vehicle. The obstacles really have become gates.

Ultimately, we go into the processes before the feelings get made, before an inquiry is needed. If you just lose yourself in a koan, for example, well, there is no problem because there’s no you, and whatever transformation goes on happens because the universe still operates well when there’s no you. Ultimately, we learn to be kind about the places the mind goes.

The Pull of Beauty

When you practice you can’t help but notice the beauty and kindness that appears in the world. The objects and people you encounter have a glow about them, a completeness. The practice becomes something that draws you toward life, rather than pushing you away from suffering. In this way you begin to notice that you can navigate by what you love. The experience of beauty is not manufactured; it is revealed. Focusing on the beautiful means hearing the voice of beauty and healing that is already going on—the thread that gets stronger and stronger as you go. This actually amounts to noticing what you really love rather than what consoles you for the night, a consolation that may be indistinguishable from suffering.

The way Amy Winehouse sings it, “Didn’t get so much in class / but I know it don’t come in a shot glass,” might make you think for a moment that it probably does come in a shot glass. But what you really, really want is not Tanqueray, which has known charms, but a revelation that’s deeply disturbing and changes your world. To follow what you love means to be skeptical about the first thing you seem to want and also to allow yourself to really want something. It’s possible to think that you have read the fine print on Buddhism, and that it means not having a self and not wanting stuff. But this hand is the Buddha’s hand, as a koan goes, and if this hand is the Buddha’s hand, it is going to pick up things that you want, touch people you want to touch. Noticing what you really want gets you out of being namby-pamby and pretending to be spiritual, which is another form of Tanqueray.

Noticing what you really want might look like appreciation, as it in this forestry ranger’s account:

A particular phrase leapt out at me for a koan: “the manifestation of one essential emptiness,” the key word being “manifestation.” Everything really began to shift from subject and object (me and other) to us after reading this. I am a manifestation of the one essential emptiness, so are you, the redwoods, a pot of beans, a nail in the roadway, or ticks on a dog. Everything I encounter is a manifestation. There’s a lot happening around me, what a palate this Universe is offering. I felt that the world is calling out to me, every sound, smell, feeling, all worthy of my loving attention.

This is a report of meditation experience, but the gift can come in any setting. I did a retreat with attending physicians who run a residency at Duke University Hospital. The meditation exercise was simple, just to be present without judging your experience and to notice life without praise and blame—essentially a koan exercise offering the experience of life without the usual thought forms. One of the senior physicians said immediately:

This is familiar.
How so?
It’s like this when I’m in the operating room. I’m at peace doing surgery. It’s the time I feel completely at home and at one with things.

Nice. To be so absorbed in attention that there are no prejudices, that there is not even someone doing surgery—that seems like taking meditation into action. Anything you are that good at gives you a measure of awareness of buddhanature, the fundamental beauty that we all share. And that awareness can be a reference point. It gives you a possibility for those areas of life in which you are not so free.

What About When It’s Not Working?

If you have a practice, it does some of the heavy lifting for you. You come back to it again and again, and then your life unfolds in a less desperate and more elegant way. But your practice doesn’t necessarily inform you of this while you are sitting. Here is a story from a woman who thought of herself as a kind of slow learner in Buddhism:

I have had a hard time meditating, and I don’t get that sense of relief and nourishment that lots of people report. I basically think that I don’t get it. I’ve just kept doing it, though; I’m interested in spiritual things, and this seems to be the only thing that it makes sense to do. Then I was looking after someone who is sick, and I enjoyed it, being helpful, being unselfish. I thought that might be something to do with what I was aiming for. Then I noticed an old friend was there. It was someone I had fallen out with and it had caused me a lot of pain, and yet there he was, helping too, passing me in the kitchen. I had no plans to forgive him, but I did. I felt that I never understood the practice but an old saying, “I’m just a person with nothing to do,” kept coming to mind, and I understood it. I thought, “That’s me.” Everything just does itself.

When you sit you are in a sacred place, whoever you are.

A Thousand Hands and Eyes

The Bodhisattva of Great Compassion has one thousand hands and eyes, and one way to feel this is that everything in the universe is one of those hands and eyes. There isn’t really a justification for being human but if there were, empathy might be it. It probably occupies a level underneath all the difficulty and pain. Compassion lets you know that even your pain might be the true thing that saves the world. If you are really stuck, it could be useful to include empathy or compassion, to forgive life and yourself for the place you have arrived at.

Empathy is like art, because it happens without thought and it doesn’t mistake today for yesterday. Here is an account of practice by a grade school teacher:

Methods don’t work for me. I don’t like to gather my attention or sit still. Certain techniques didn’t feel right. I liked the koans because there was a lot of room to experiment. Anything I do is practice. I brought my practice into the classroom where I work. Immediately I felt the difference between how it had been and how it manifests in the work with the kids. Now I can receive what they have to give to me.

For example, there was an unhappy kid at school. The other kids didn’t like her, and she would perceive things as attacks and get mean-spirited back. Her unhappiness was spilling out around her. One day she came walking up to my desk, and my first thought was, “This kid has got to get her life together; I don’t like her,” and then suddenly my heart opened and none of that was there. I was sitting, I was at her height, and I felt love pouring out from me. She was about to complain. But when she looked up at me and our eyes met she couldn’t remember what she was upset about. From that moment on, our relationship changed. That’s how the meditation practice shows up. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. But I was open enough for something to happen.

Practice gives you the opportunity to give, and that is something that makes human beings happy.

Life Outside The Burning House

Eventually, the distinction between your spiritual practice and the rest of your life blurs and perhaps disappears. This is because spiritual practice is interesting and works, and you end up noticing it wherever you look. It appears in some form every day of your life, so we can say that there’s a long arc to a spiritual practice. Within that long arc, there is always trial and error. There are lots of things you don’t discover unless you happen to stumble into them. It’s a nice thing to be offered a path, and the important thing is to enjoy the way station where you happen to be spending the night.

Meditation offers a path out of the burning house, without abandoning the promise and good-heartedness of being human. Practice is the last best hope of living up to that good-heartedness, the only thing that never hurts and usually helps. And even at the beginning of the meditation path, on a good day it’s exciting. It actually makes you happy.

Surprises on the Way, John Tarrant, Shambhala Sun, May 2008.

The post Surprises on the Way: An Article By John Tarrant appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

with Rachel Boughton at the Santa Rosa Creek Zen Center

May 22- June 12  Wednesdays 7-9pm

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Instructor: Rachel Boughton has taught meditation for 15 years and been with Pacific Zen Institute since 2001.  She discovered meditation long ago, by a fortuitous accident when she was quite young, after reading a book and sending away for instructions. It worked and has been a fascinating adventure ever since.  For more information email rachelboughton@comcast.net

The post Count the Stars: A Class On Koans appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

Omega Institute, July 19-21

Buddhist wisdom teaches that we needn’t feel trapped on an emotional roller coaster, up one moment and down the next. Through meditation and contemplation, we can transform our experience and our relationship to our emotions.

In this seventh annual What the Buddhists Teach program, copresented by Shambhala Sun, three outstanding Buddhist teachers—Anyen Rinpoche, Polly Young-Eisendrath, and John Tarrant—explore the nature of emotions and how to work with them in our everyday lives.

Read more about this exciting weekend retreat at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

Registration available now.

The post Getting Off The Emotional Rollercoaster appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.

Tonight I want to talk about a boring koan– “Count the stars in the sky.” There are some passages in life that are like airports. You’re there not because you want to be there but because you’re on your way to somewhere else. They’re antechambers or vestibules. And there are some passages in meditation that seem like that, too. They seem to not have particular value, but somehow you need to get through them to get somewhere else. People have their different lists of what these occasions are, but being in a traffic jam might be one, or waiting in line for the DMV might be another.

I had to renew my driver’s license about six months ago and I called up the DMV, and they said, “Oh yes, you can come in and wait.” I said, “Well what would be a good day?” And they said, “Monday wouldn’t be good.” I said, “How long would the wait be on Monday?” And they said, “If you came in on Monday you might get in on Tuesday if you waited all day.” I said, “Okay, what about Tuesday?” “No, I wouldn’t advise Tuesday.” And I said. “What about Friday, then?” I leapt to the end of the week, and they said, “Friday is bad because it’s before the weekend.” That’s how I found out that it’s a permanent vestibule, the DMV. I was going up to Yosemite and I found that the little town of Mariposa has a whole DMV for nobody. So I went there, no waiting, a nice smile, a photo, done.

Waiting for someone else to do something, waiting for someone else to change their mind, waiting for someone else to be impressed by you, waiting for someone else to die, waiting for someone else to fall in love with you, waiting for someone else to pass sentence on you, there’s a whole list. But they’re all times when you might think this is a time between other times.

Tibetans have an idea about betweens–that, really, that’s all you get in life. Their term for it is bardo. I was originally introduced to a bardo in terms of the meditations on the after-death realm, and the imagination there is that after you die it’s crucial how you handle yourself, because you might make a mistake and be reborn as a kangaroo. But if you don’t make a mistake, you’ll either get a very favorable rebirth and get enlightened, or you’ll just get enlightened right there on the spot, as you die. The idea is that you are in a between realm, because you are between births. But then after you get born, that’s a between realm, too, because it’s between deaths. There’s a bardo of waking, and then there’s a bardo of sleeping and dreaming. There’s a bardo of dying, because it’s between living and death, and then there’s a bardo of after death, and so it goes. It’s always a between.

I noticed that something good about being in plain or boring places in my own practice is that it could give me the appreciation of simplicity, and it wasn’t always a bad thing. For example, there’s a plain, anonymous brown bird, whose name I have managed not to learn, who hops around under my orange tree and makes the whole garden alive. It’s not an interesting bird like a hummingbird, it doesn’t swear at you like hawks do, but the whole garden comes alive with it. So it can be good, those plain moments. They can give you an appreciation for the thusness of things and the way whatever you look at, you’re just there, wherever you think you should be. You’re where you are and that’s that.

I did the koan “Count the stars in the sky,” a long time ago now, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ and I just did it. The way koans are set up, there are two ways to do it, there’s the orthodox Hakuin response–Hakuin was a medieval Japanese master who set down a whole list of suggested responses that came down the oral tradition, and that’s interesting, because you can test what your own inner feel is. But since we’re reimagining koans in a different culture, what your own inner feel is and where the koan might be leading you is actually more important. It’s like the brown bird in the garden, it makes it alive for you. So anyway, I just sort of walked outside and there were the stars and it was kind of fun. I started counting them and it was sort of impossible, but not in a very interesting way. It was impossible, but not wildly so, to count the stars in the sky, because counting is such a familiar idea, and numbering the stars is something you do.

So I just went into my teacher, and my teacher had said that he hadn’t himself had an enlightenment experience, but he had this recipe that had come down from Hakuin. So he could compare what you said, and decide how you were doing. It seemed so weird it was sort of fine and he got points for candor. And so he compared my response with his recipe and said ‘good oh,’ and gave me the next koan. I just counted the stars for him. But it didn’t change my life, it wasn’t one of those things I wrote home about.

Then when I became a teacher, I noticed that everybody would sort of do the same thing with this koan, that it was mildly boring-for me. People would come through and have a very simple, quick relationship to this koan, and it would pass by them. It was a venerable koan, and I thought, well, it came in the curriculum fairly soon after people’s hearts have started to open, and minds have started to change, and I thought further, well everybody’s floating on the ceiling at that time, and they can’t tell the difference between themselves and the redwood tree because they’re so in the vastness, and so what’s wrong with counting? You know, taxes, interest rates, it’s very concrete. It’s sort of like, stock prices… the whole of civilization is there, the first cuneiform scratches in clay tablets saying who owed how much to whom, an so maybe it’s grounding, and this is my little story about it. I didn’t think much about it the koan. But because we are adapting and feeling our way I revise the curriculum every few years and each every time I would revise the curriculum I’d look at this koan and wonder.

Over the years, my big question was ‘What are koans for?’ I don’t know why, but I was the only person I ever knew in my own training situation who was interested in that question. I’m still interested in it. What do they do, anyway? Which means, what do koans do in terms other than internally, in the koan system? And as far as I can tell, they do two things. One is that they get you in touch with the vast background, they take away everything else, and they do that by making all your stories about who you are and what the world is like irrelevant. All your stories get thrown overboard.

You may think it’s important to be John or Sally or whatever your name is, but the universe doesn’t, and after awhile you don’t, either. It’s more fun to be the universe than to have opinions about being John or Sally. And then you realize, all this stuff I worry about – which between am I in? Am I dying, am I alive, whatever-is all a kind of foreground thing, but I’m resting in the vast background. I am the vast background. The tradition waves at this discovery, speaking of it as emptiness, or your true nature or our original face. And koans are super at uncovering that realm. I notice that when the heart opens in that way, then a generous feel for life comes with it. There’s a kindness, a love, an awareness of the beauty of things, and this kindness is just everywhere. You’re not limited.

So that’s one thing koans are for, and then there’s another, perhaps even weirder, thing that koans do, which is, that when you’re keeping company with a koan, when you’re in the field of a koan, the delusion that for you is attached to that koan will come up and seize you. I notice, for example, if you’re into comparison or envy in any way, I can think of a couple of koans that would bring them up a lot. In one of those examples, a great teacher went up to give a talk and pointed to the blinds. There are two blinds, and two people go and roll them both up exactly the same way, and he says, “One’s right, one’s wrong.” Some people just go insane with that koan. If you’re into being right and wrong, any right and wrong program you’ve got will get hooked. You think, I hate this koan, it’s wrong. Or I hate this koan, I can’t understand it, I’m wrong. Or I hate this whole Zen scene, its completely wrong. Meanwhile the old teacher is just laughing.

Another example is “The great way is not difficult, it just avoids picking and choosing.” If you don’t pick and choose, every part of you that picks and chooses will start quivering, shaking, salivating and thinking, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be picking and choosing, maybe I shouldn’t want things, but I do want things and what wrong with that? Maybe picking something wholeheartedly without thought is not picking and choosing, maybe I’m hopeless at this’ and so on. And you’ll pick and choose about whether or not you pick and choose, and you’ll lie to yourself about how you do it, and all that.

I think from the point of the view of the transformation process of the koan, this struggle is just as valuable as connecting with the great background, the vastness. Because you get to see how you do things. You get to see the delusions of your mind and the interesting ways they work, and from the koan’s point of view, it doesn’t mind, there’s nothing wrong with your delusions, they’re just life. That’s called you. Your delusions are what you call you. Nothing wrong with that. However, if you find that you suffer, then you might want to investigate those delusions and you might want to throw a few of them overboard.

So far so good. To return to this koan about counting the stars: One day I give this guy the koan and he doesn’t know it’s a boring koan. So he goes off with it and it’s foggy so he can’t count the stars and then, so he counts the stars and he finds it’s kind of cool counting stars. You’re just involved in life. So far, so good. And he just keeps going and he’s counting the stars when he’s driving and he’s counting the stars at work during the day, and he just treats it like one of the great koans. He’s counting the stars and then he comes in to me with this wonderful thing. I’d forgotten what koan he was on, which I always do, and he just starts pointing at things:

“That’s it, that’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“That’s a star,”

and he points at me and he points at the flowers and he points at the table and he points at the redwood tree. “That’s a star and that’s a star and that’s a star!” And he says, “I’m all those things. That’s why I can’t die.” And I said, “Wow!” And then I thought that my thing about the boring koan was the delusion field for me about that koan. And I was excited, thrilled. The koan came alive for me in that way, it was great.

So, to recapitulate, first I thought I found a boring koan, I thought maybe this is good, maybe I should feature it and advertise it: ‘Boring koans offered here.’ But basically I didn’t think about it much, until I realized that while it’s true that it’s good to get used to the plain qualities of your mind, and it’s good to get used to the moments when things are flat because it’s good to get used to every kind of state of mind you might have and not be afraid of it, so you can tolerate and embrace everything that your mind or your heart gives you, while it’s good to be able to do that, it’s nonsense, too, because if it’s really flat and boring, that’s a delusion state. You’re resisting something. And that’s fine, but the vastness is so big that we tend to resist it, because we think in order to be John or Sally, we need to make things boring and to close them down just a little. And if we don’t close things down a bit, we’re frightened. It’s as if we might disappear. It’d be so exciting and we’d be so vast”it’s not that I would be an idiot, well yes I would, but I’m an idiot anyway, so that’s not the problem–the problem is that we are afraid that we couldn’t contain ourselves.

And here’s another thing: In the history of koans, you read about a kind of cowboy culture in which somebody goes off and meditates really hard and ignores his, usually it’s a him, body, and is pushed to the edge of breaking and suddenly breaks through a koan. It can happen that way and it’s not a bad thing when it does, yet it’s not the only way. The way of the cowboy is a way of high drama, it’s also the way of the diva, and if it’s prescribed for everyone it’s authoritarian. People learn in many different ways and the cowboy mode is one of the approaches to an infinitely varied path.

Something else that is present in the old stories and that I find in our universe too, is that endless conversations are going on, and that these conversations are always really about connection and linkage and love and kindness. There are endless ways in which a collaboration is going on right now, and that’s how you make a tradition live in a new culture, and e something beautiful. We learn from each other, we collaborate and hold hands.

I was touched to learn something from a bloke who wasn’t deluded enough to realize that he shouldn’t have got anything out of that koan. Or not that he shouldn’t have got anything, but he should have got a small thing. And instead of getting a small thing, he got this huge thing. So I was thrilled. I can now safely call it a boring koan because I know it isn’t.

Then I started remembering things myself. I remembered a certain stage in my life when counting opened my life. I was living with my grandparents when I was about four. It was spring, there was an old gentleman walking up the street called Mr. Rolands and I waylaid him at his gate. I’d never met him before, and I asked him would he teach me to count, because he was standing by the gate, and it seemed the obvious thing to do. So he did, he taught me to count to one thousand. I remember we were standing by snapdragons and he told me that there were no more numbers after that. Perhaps he was tired of teaching me, but I was quite happy with that answer, it was nice to know. Numbers can be beautiful, numbers can be alive. There’s nothing boring about numbers. “Count the stars in the sky.”

I remember my grandfather would take me outside at night on the black tarmac of the street, and his house was above the public hospital in town, with its black chimney burning the bits that were left over from the healing process, and he had an antique sextant that had been given to him when he was a boy. It was made around 1830 and it was teak and ivory and brass and smoky glass and you could take a sighting from a star and find your latitude, just in case. Very helpful if you’re standing by the public hospital. He thought it was important to know the names of the stars, and he advised me that it would give me a sense of the largeness of life to be close to the stars. In fact, he advised pacing the bridge on night-watch at sea as a way to have a spiritual practice. So in other words, I had plenty of information myself about counting and stars, and had happily missed it.

When a koan starts coming alive for you, it will make parts of your life alive that, previously, were not. It will make parts of you alive that may not have been before. A small thing, an interesting thing. And so then you’ll find that there really isn’t any DMV line, or airport security line where life isn’t happening. We might often think that there is, but that’s our own way of making ourselves small. I think one reason people are so shocked when something goes wrong on an airliner is that we have the fantasy that nothing ever happens on an airliner, really. An airliner is a vessel in which you get from San Francisco to Sydney without anything happening.

But really there isn’t a place in life where nothing happens, and there isn’t a place in life where the beauty and power of the great background doesn’t come through like light, a fountain of light pouring through everything, through your own heart and through everything you see and hear and touch.

– John Tarrant, PZI Director

 

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The whole of the ancient, master teachings on suffering come down to this: Suffering is the notion ‘This isn’t it.’

Freedom, waking up and fearlessness come down to the simplicity of,  ’Wait a minute, what if this is it?’

John Tarrant’s article about working with the dark materials of our lives was published in the March 2013 issue of Shamblala Sun. It is reprinted below.

You Don’t Have to Know:
Our Dark Materials

Into this wild Abyss
The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave—
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds

-John Milton

When my father was dying I flew home to see him. The streets were bright with autumn sunlight and I passed into the dark interior of the hospice and came to a room that was small and windowless. As soon as someone else died he would get a better room—information that made me consider the other patients with an appraising glance. His body, overwhelmed by inward forces of chaos and unregulated cell growth, gave off animal smells. He seemed to be struggling up to the surface of a pool and, from his skin tone and eyes, was in pain and at the same time overmedicated. He gazed at me and pretended not to know who I was. I pretended not to know who I was either, we laughed, and that opened a gate to our last time together.

I think of moments of pressure and difficulty as like that, gateways, the beginning of a journey. Everyone around my father was anxious and sad and I started to feel that way too. It seemed obligatory, even courteous. As I got to know him in his dying self that week he was often in pain, sometimes afraid, and I could feel helplessness rising in me.

It’s easy to forget to be curious, and to grab an off-the-shelf knowledge, something like “this is awful.”  Not reaching for off-the-shelf understandings, though, is an important skill.

Visitors were often cheerful. My father, though, didn’t want to be told he was looking fine (it all depends on what “fine” means) or treated with anxious kindness. He would play the role of the dying man if he thought that was requested but when the visitor left he would shrug and go back to his conversations—about when he swam horses across the river, and how he kept trying to make his marriage make sense but didn’t ever find a pattern to it, and sometimes about how discouraged he got in the long night hours—small details and large meanings. He was just dying, and wanted to live it as far as he could, with whoever showed up. He didn’t like to have a lot of pain killers on board because he wanted to be there for his life.

The whole of the ancient, master teachings on suffering come down to this: Suffering is the notion “This isn’t it,” and it’s variants such as, “I can’t bear this, it shouldn’t be happening,” and “I have to know how this will turn out” and “What if it gets worse?”

Freedom, waking up and fearlessness come down to the simplicity of,  “Wait a minute, what if this is it?” and its variants, “No need to bear it,” and “I don’t know.”

The thing to do at the beginning of a journey is to take a step, any step will do. I have another hospice story: A friend was dying, a family doc in his thirties with a young wife and a young child. I flew in to see him too and as I walked down the halls of that hospice, I heard voices announcing my arrival…and began to feel a grief and a terrible, jittery obligation to make things better. I couldn’t imagine what I could say to help. It became hard to breathe. And as I walked down that hall full of good people, all of us wanting suffering to be relieved and feeling at a loss to bring that about, it was clear that I didn’t even know if my friend would be coherent, or what I would say to him if he were, or if there was any way to help. And this not knowing was a good thing because it was possible and true and the only door out of the building of pain, and anything else wasn’t possible or real. I burst happily into the hospice room and my friend wanted me to listen to music with him (Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”). He delivered a rhapsody on oxygen, he offered me a swig, and I agreed: Oxygen is a fine, fine thing.

And now, the famous story of Bodhidharma, the red haired, blue eyed, pierced and tattooed barbarian from India, and Emperor Wu of China:

“What’s the first principle of the holy teaching?” asks the Emperor.

“Vast emptiness, nothing holy,” says Bodhidharma,

“Well who are you then?”

“I don’t know,” says Bodhidharma.

There’s a layered quality to suffering and intense emotion. As you become interested, a tiny, elf light appears in the darkest dungeon. That’s the gate of emptiness. As you become more interested, you walk deeper into the forest and everything looks different. Sometimes it becomes joyful right away but it doesn’t need to. It’s become a path and that is enough.

So, no first principles, but a few rules of thumb can be fun:

1. You don’t have to know.

2. If you take a step, any step, and feel about, you’ll find ground

3. Whatever happens is your journey, what to do is given.

4. It’s for your benefit, honorable reader. It’s for you. No one was ever given another now.

5. Curiosity saves the cat.

6. The question, ‘What is this?’ is a koan and always reveals a gateway.

7. No need to bear it.

8. When we want something to be over, we lose compassion for ourselves, now.

9. What if there’s nothing wrong?

10. Not having a first principle.

My father and I still talk sometimes in dreams and in the spaces opened by a koan. We talk about the weather, what I have in my garden, how my daughter’s doing.

We’re all hurtling through our lives and the planet is hurtling through space without a seat belt. We have to discover successively more freedom inside the terrible things that have happened and terrible things that certainly will happen, and the whole of it is also a mysterious splendor, full of kindness, welcome and cups of tea.

 - John Tarrant

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Read a blog post by Janice Boughton, Internal Medicine doctor and Pacific Zen retreat participant about how koans and meditation help her do her job better and enjoy it more, even though the mechanism is rather mysterious.

The post Doctor likes Koans and Meditation appeared first on Pacific Zen Institute.