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Sesshin Field Notes: In Praise of the Dark

Yunyan asked Daowu, “How does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use all her hands and eyes?” 

Wu said, “It’s like reaching behind you for a pillow in the night.” 

Yan said, “I understand.”  

Wu said, “How do you understand?” 

Yan replied, “All over the body are hands and eyes.” 

Wu said, “You have said quite a bit there, but you’ve only said eighty percent of it.” 

Yan said, “What do you say, Elder Brother?” 

Wu replied, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”

—The Blue Cliff Record Case 89

What is the heart-mind of the bodhisattva upon entering Zen sesshin—cloistered silence, many hours of meditation, walks through the wooded hills? I pay close attention to my dreams in the weeks before sesshin to perhaps understand what my psyche is trying to reflect back to me. Several days before our recent fall retreat, I had the following dream:

I am sitting in a comfortable public space where people are moving about. The sun is shining in a garden outside and people are enjoying the warm weather. I find myself chatting with a teacher whom I had known at Zen Center of Los Angeles forty years ago. He says to me, “I shouldn’t have chosen that guy as my assistant; he wasn’t any good.” The implication was that he should have picked me instead. Mildly flattered, I am also incredulous: I have not spoken with this teacher in thirty years, yet I have a single important connection: the teacher in the dream was the first to give me the koan Mu.

More than ten years ago when I became a teacher in the Pacific Zen tradition, I had a dream about Taizan Maezumi Roshi, who had been this man’s teacher. Still in the dream with the younger man, I tell him of my dream about Maezumi:

In the early one morning dark, Maezumi comes down the stairs to do kentan, a review of the zendo, which is full of monks in black robes seated on cushions, atop a raised platform. Only a single seat is open, to my right. Maezumi sits next to me, which I take to mean he approves of my teaching.

This telling ended my dream within a dream.

What did my present dream mean to me? At first I thought it might have to do with the linkage of succession from the young teacher back to his teacher and further back to his. But that explanation did not seem to hold power.

A few days later I spoke with a friend about the dream, and she said it perhaps meant I had lost confidence in my own understanding and teaching. Seeking two approvals, I was seeking validation outside myself when I should be seeking it inside. Though a touch painful to hear, that interpretation rang of truth and had a warmth to it.

In meeting students in dokusan on the first couple of days of sesshin, I heard them express similar doubts and fears. As bodhisattvas coming into retreat, they too were struggling with the materia negra, the dark matter of the soul.

Though we do not realize it at first, passing through the dark night of the soul is the place of true freedom. From Melville’s Moby-Dick:

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said, judiciously, “I think I shall praise it.”

—Jon Joseph

Writer’s Note: As I send this out, we are entering the final days of our annual fall sesshin, “The Manifestations of the 1000-Armed Goddess of Mercy,” held at the Santa Sabina Convent in San Rafael, California. We have been holding two or three retreats here every year for a decade, but ownership of this beautiful century-old Benedictine sanctuary will soon change and we will move our retreats elsewhere. We wish to thank the many generations of women who have lived here, dedicating their lives to God and their community. We will miss them.

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community