PZI Events Calendar
W E L C O M E to the PZI Events Calendar! Here you will find all upcoming events and registration links for PZI Zen Online retreats, sesshins, and weekly meditations & talks. Search by individual event, day, or month. Save to your Google Calendar or iCal Calendar. No experience required to participate. All event times are Pacific Time. Questions? Contact Lucas at PZI Support.
F E A T U R E D
April 26: What Is This Light That Everybody Has? – Deep Sit Sunday Zen with John Tarrant & Tess Beasley
May 7–10: Say A True Word & I Will Stay The Night – Open Mind Retreat with John Tarrant, Tess Beasley, & Allison Atwill
June 8–14: Dragons & Tigers, Oh My! – Our Great Summer Sesshin with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers
- This event has passed.
MONDAY ZEN with Jon Joseph: Our Mysterious Melody: Playing the Flute with No Holes and Other Impossibilities
REGISTER
Play the flute with no holes
—from the Pacific Zen Miscellaneous Collection
What a marvelous and mysterious thing, to cross the border from the land of sense to the country of sensibility and the play of no-sense. One old Zen dictionary interprets the “flute with no holes” as “one from which any sound may be heard.”
What is the source of that sound? What is our natural virtuosity?
The origin of this phrase is found in Yuanwu’s comment on a koan in the Blue Cliff Record. Xuefeng, before he became a teacher, was living alone in a hut when two monks came to visit. Feng pushed open the door and asked, “What is it?” One of the monks responded, “What is it?” Yuanwu comments:
Ghost eyes. A flute with no holes. He raises his head, wearing horns.
He mentions this magical instrument a few other times, suggesting it be used like a rug beater:
A flute with no holes strikes against a wool felt pounding board.
This flute is not picky about its sounds.
In a similar spirit, the 18th c Japanese master Genro also gathered one hundred koans with commentaries, calling it the Tekkei Tosui (鐵笛倒吹), which means “blowing the iron flute upside down.” But alas, Genro did not include this koan in his collection except in the title.
What is it, to blow the flute with no holes? In a posthumous collection of her father’s poems, Kim Stafford writes that her father would often say, “Let’s talk recklessly… I must be willingly fallible to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.”
Whatever the river says, I say.
—Jon Joseph
ASK ME by William Stafford
Sometime when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me the difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can look at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden: and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
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
