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
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TUESDAY ZEN with David Weinstein: The Red Thread
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There is an old Chinese story featuring the red thread, involving a young boy.
Walking home one night a boy saw an old man standing in the moonlight. The man explained to the boy that a red thread was connecting him to his destined wife. The old man then showed him the girl who was destined to be his wife. Being young and having no interest in having a wife, the boy picked up a rock, threw it at her, and ran away.
Many years later, when the boy had grown into a young man, his parents arranged a wedding for him. On the night of his wedding, his wife waited for him in their bedroom, with the traditional veil covering her face. Raising it, the man was delighted to find that his wife was a great beauty. However, she wore an adornment on her eyebrow. She explained that when she was a girl, a boy threw a rock that struck her face, leaving a scar on her eyebrow. She wore the adornment to cover it up. It was the same young girl, connected to him by the red thread, that the old man had revealed to him when he was a boy.
The lesson of this old Chinese story would seem to be that you can’t fight fate.
Buddhism took the story, as it took many other stories and images from the existing Chinese culture, and tweaked it. The way it changed is reminiscent of Indra’s Net, a metaphor dating back to the pre-Hindu Vedic tradition, used to describe the interconnectedness of all things. Indra’s Net has a jewel at each intersection which reflects all other jewels in the net. It is an image not only of interconnectedness but also of interpenetration.
A millennium later Leonardo DaVinci put it this way, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” An alternate translation I have seen has it as, “Everything is everything.” Half a millennium after Leonardo, the Beatles put it this way, “I am you and you are me and we are all together.”
As for the rock throwing in the original Chinese story, it is not fate we resist, it is our interconnectedness and interpenetration that we resist—the result of the anxiety of the self losing its rank.
Thrown any rocks lately?
—David Weinstein
COME JOIN US on Tuesdays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
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David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community
