Dharma Rain Character

Still Point

Newsletter of Dharma Rain Zen Center

Portland, Oregon

Volume XXVII Number 4

July-August 2002

 


     
     
     

 


By Gyokuko Carlson

 

This is an edited Dharma Talk given by Gyokuko in February of 1996. Thanks to Bukkai Washburn for transcribing the talk.

What is a "person of practice?" How do you become a person of practice?

A "person of practice" carries out the forms of practice with their body naturally and smoothly, paying attention without drawing attention, without appearing to do anything special, while letting the deeper dharma of the forms inform them.

We have many "forms" of practice. Paying attention to how you leave your shoes is one of them. When I came in the doors this morning, I passed thirty pairs of shoes. Almost every pair was put side by side in straight rows, and I could walk down the hall and not trip over anything. It did my heart good to see thirty pairs of shoes straight.

The complexity of practice forms goes all the way from there up to learning to do oryoki meals, which involve elaborate ritual. One of the parts of oryoki meals I really love is right at the end, when you've finished your meal, cleaned up your bowls, and everything is done. You then bow to your bowls, put your hand over the top, put one-half of the napkin through your fingers this way and the other half through your fingers that way, pull, and your bowls are tied in a neat little package. It feels finished. The body tells you, "Ha. It's finished." It's very satisfying. It's not just the food that is satisfying; the physical movements that go with the eating are satisfying.

When we encounter forms, we may complain, saying, "Why?" Or, "Why this way? I prefer it another way. I don't like to pay attention to how I put my shoes straight. I don't care how I put my shoes." And in a sense none of it matters. Absolutely none of it matters. But, on the other side of the ledger, everything matters. Every teensy little dust mote matters. The joyful part is when you put your attention into the little things that matter, resting your heart in knowing it doesn't matter, but still putting your attention into the little things. You discover along the way there is something these little things have to teach you. The forms of practice are dharma teachers.

Another example of a form of practice is making gassho. There are pages and pages of writings about making gassho. About how this finger represents something and this other finger represents something, and when I put this finger with this other finger it means something, until I get my fingers just exactly so and there's no gap between them and this means some metaphysical ya da ya da. It's just a concept. Until one day when you're grumbling and griping about some person or some thing that you feel isn't right, it's too much work, but out of habit you bring your hands together and the heart goes calm. That's metaphysical. That's not a concept. That's the body learning the dharma, or teaching, of gassho. The forms are not magic. They don't do all the work for you. But the mind will follow if you can get the body in line.

You come closer to the real truth in the Dharma when you discover it with your body, when you discover it with your experience, than when you discover it as a concept. I can tell you that there is a teaching in putting your shoes straight. I can tell you that it has to do with harmony, and it has to do with integration with the universe. I can tell you things like that, but it remains just a concept for you until you go through the process day after day of putting your shoes straight because the Chief Junior tells you to and she's going to nag you if they're askew. Then one day you put your shoes straight and you feel something about straightening your shoes that teaches you the dharma of putting your shoes straight. It's not a concept any more, it's something you know in your bones. You may not even be able to explain it to your head. You probably don't have the words for it, but you know in your bones there is a good reason why you want to do it this way.

The dharma that is contained in the forms of practice goes to a place where the particulars of this form versus that form don't matter. The forms that we practice with in this temple are going to be different than the forms used elsewhere. They are going to be different wherever you go. But when you learn the dharma of the forms with your body, you can go to another place and practice with different forms and still be seen as a person of practice because the dharma goes deep.

You can't let the head lead in this business. When I was first learning this Zen business, I found chanting the ancestral line extremely boring, repetitive and stupid. Practicing with it over the years, I discovered that it is not cold, distant or repetitive. The ancestors are personalities, and while they aren't always with me when I chant those names, sometimes I do feel their presence because of the chanting. There have been times I felt like the ancestors reached out and saved me from my own despair. That, for me, was the teaching of the ancestral line. I wouldn't have decided to do that practice ahead of time, on my own, but it was part of the forms of practice. I did it because I wanted to go where this train was headed, and I didn't realize beforehand that this form would be a significant part of the means for me.

If you try to decide ahead of time which of these forms is going to be your dharma teacher, you're not going to make it off the train platform. You have to put your body into the position of zazen before the zazen can start to teach you about equanimity, about peace, about quieting the mind, and about the other thousand-and-one teachings that exist in the position of doing zazen. The same is true with putting your shoes straight, closing a door using both hands, picking up a cup with two hands, cleaning every grain of oatmeal out of a breakfast bowl, and other silly little forms of practice. When you do them and pay attention, there's tremendous depth of teaching, but it almost never starts with your head. Later on you figure out, "Oh, I got something back there."

So the first stage of becoming a person of practice is to appear to be a person of practice, to work on the external. Learn the forms so you can do them automatically. They eventually come naturally and smoothly, and stop appearing to be something special. In fact, just moving along with the flow of practice is one of the forms of practice. Not standing out, going with.

However, it's more than just doing it with the body. If a robot does these forms of practice, it is not going to get it. To really be a person of practice, you have to let the dharma that is in the forms inform you, and to do that you also have to keep the mind engaged. Keep the mind engaged so that it just notices, just notices, over and over again. Let go of the part of the mind that is trying to edit, trying to compromise and weasel out of doing the forms completely, but you should notice even that. Pay attention to resistance and try not to club yourself over the head with the fact that there is resistance. I know sometimes it can be extreme. Just keep coming back, being gentle with yourself. There's also teaching in the resistance, so you don't want to dismiss it too quickly. However, you also don't want it to rule your life, so just pay attention and try to keep the form. If the form activates a resistance, then there may be opposite sides of the same teaching happening.

If practice starts to get totally robotic and monotonous and you find yourself going elsewhere, taking trips while you're doing the forms, try to come back. It's just zazen. Keep coming back to, "What is my hand doing? What is my mouth doing? What are my ears doing? How much noise do I make when I go down for a bow? How smoothly can I get up?" Keep paying attention to all the little nuances of it. The dharma of it will come through, and you will become a person of practice.

Q: I think that between the resistance and just doing the forms, there's a point of practice where one can embellish the forms. "I'm going to do this great bow! I'm going to put my shoes perfectly straight because I know that's the way they should be."

A: You are pointing to the transition between just doing the forms externally to taking them deeper. The way it feels during this transition is that you are simply going into it wholeheartedly. What you may realize after the fact is that the doing was a lot for show. There is a point where we really want to be seen as doing everything perfectly grandly. We're so spiritual. Really, it's just feeding ego and feeding self. It's fine. It's a stage. If you just keep training and don't get stuck there, you go a place beneath which is a lot more gentle. Paying attention without drawing attention.

Q: I'm always struck by the resistance that following forms brings in the world around me. At home, raising my kids in a somewhat unmindful sort of way, if I start changing my expectation for myself, I might get a response like, "You've changed. Now you're doing this." Resentments and tensions arise just because I'm trying to pay attention to what I'm doing.

A: One thing that is really useful is to disconnect your interpretation reflex and go back to just noticing. When you make this statement, you get this reaction. When you do this activity, this happens. Don't be too quick to judge why others are reacting. Just notice. There may be more to your action than you're acknowledging, and you might be able to clarify your intention. You may find that you can just ask for a certain amount of space or a certain circumstance, without asking for approval or looking to fulfill some other little other agenda item that got tacked on there when you weren't looking.

Q: Some of the things that you've mentioned seem, at first glance, pretty picky - like straightening shoes. Any suggestions to how a person can help a child to pay attention to the little things without coming off as a total jerk?

A: A child has a personality all unto herself. You may notice that she does pay attention to the details, and your challenge is not to get her to pay attention, but to channel the attention she is paying. You can reward her when her attention-paying has positive aspects, and when she gets crabby and nitpicky, try to talk her down to a more generous attitude.

 


by Jennifer Harbin

(Jennifer worked with Domyo recently on an independent study, Ecology and Religion, through Prescott College in Arizona. Part of Jennifer's assignment was to attend a couple of events at the Zen Center in order to experience Zen practice first-hand, and then write about it. This is the result.)

I was sure that everybody knew something that I did not. For starters, I entered a different door than everyone else. I carried my shoes through the room full of quiet people to the other entrance where the shoes must have belonged. I know not to bring expectations to new experiences, but I could not help but believe I was going to the land of happy monks and peaceful communion with all living things. Instead, I was surrounded by people who seemed to take pleasure in torturing themselves with obsessions about the endless suffering of the human condition.

I wanted to leave, but found the room upstairs to be a bit more comfortable - after I got over the fact that I said "hello" to the guy in the plaid shirt. I knew that he knew right away that I had not achieved inner peace. I was still so obviously bound by social convention. I convinced myself that being unbound by convention would make an inappropriate "hello" insignificant at least, and bold or daring at most.

I tried to meditate. Then the bells rang. Then the masochists joined me and the plaid shirt guy. Next we chanted. At first I followed along. Then I felt as though I was a follower with no will of my own, so I stopped... but there was also the possibility that I was just being arrogant, so I chanted. Of course, that's what cults want you to think. I stopped. When I realized that I was not being open-minded, I finished the chant with a great deal of indecision.

Zazen was a relief after my huge mental ordeal about the chant. I sat. I breathed. I was safe. We were all just sitting. Oh. Why not? We could have all been driving or eating or urinating or sleeping, but we just sat. Why not? There was no movie or speaker or... Did our government know that people gathered just to sit? Freedom of assembly.

The class that followed was a little more light-hearted. These were normal people. The group did not have some huge secret that they were keeping from me, though I did begin to wonder if other people had the same thoughts I was having... like we were all wondering if anyone was enlightened. Emperor's new clothes syndrome. The class was devoted to understanding the different branches of Buddhism. It struck me as hilarious that there were distinctions among the groups and a competitiveness surrounding them. I guess I had this idea that Buddhists were more evolved or something. Only if they were affiliated with the diamond vehicle...

When the class was over, we all moved to put on our shoes. I made some joke about us being in a locker room. No one responded. I felt dumb. Then I felt dumb for feeling dumb. I laughed. I drove home.

A workshop for starting a practice clarified things for me big time. Here was a group of people with questions similar to my own and a context for discussion. I shared with the group my conflicting feelings about the chanting the evening before. We discussed our strong beliefs surrounding ritual. We talked about altars and ceremony.We discussed spiritual materialism, bowing, and bells. I did not feel dumb or intimidated. I was surprised by the range of feelings I was having about things that should not have been so foreign to me. I came to the realization that I had formed opinions about Buddhism based on books I had read that were not entirely accurate and that, like the basic Buddhist concept, direct experience is more valid than reading about it.We ended our discussion with tea and cookies. We all thanked each other for the insights. I was relieved by the genuineness of the group and my own ability to recognize my reactions to the time I spent there.

My limited experiences at the Dharma Rain Zen center have been far more insightful than my years of reading about Buddhism. I have stopped forming conclusions and have begun asking more questions. Perhaps one day even my questions will be answered by pure experience.

 

(To see larger (and readable) version of "The Trainee" click here. Large image - may take about 12 seconds to load.)

 

Recent months have seen a flurry of activity regarding property. ZCO has moved into a vacant grade school with almost 20 acres of land near Clatskanie, and has launched Great Vow Zen Monastery. It has great potential, but it will take a tremendous amount of work and capital investment to pull it together. They have a lease with an option to buy, and hope to make it financially viable within two years to complete the transaction.

Thanks to a great effort by Domyo Sater, we brought plans for alterations to the Dharma House to the building department, and the meeting went very well. It now looks likely that we will not have to make as many expensive alterations to the building as we once feared. We need to meet code for a mixed use, and for now much of the pressure has been reduced so that we won't need to start any major work until the summer of 2003, and the overall cost should be significantly lower than our early estimates. For this summer, we will turn our attention to remodeling the kitchen at the Sangha House.

We are still interested in finding a property that would put all our activities on one campus, so to speak, and to increase our capacity for residential training. We have established a Property Committee to keep an ear to the ground should the perfect location turn up. We had called it a Property Search Committee, but that seemed to suggest a more aggressive process than we had in mind. We are in reasonably good condition at the present in that we can meet the needs of the sangha where we are, our parking issues are pretty much resolved, and we can continue to grow in this location (such as through another property purchase). The board decided not to be aggressive in a property search at present, but to consolidate our growth and get through the changes we need to make at the Dharma House. We envision this consolidation period to be about three to five years. At that time we will reevaluate our situation, look at the market, and plan a more aggressive strategy, if feasible. So, why have a Property Committee if we are holding back for now? Because we want a system in place to evaluate properties that come on the market during this period so that we don't miss a perfect opportunity, should it arise. The Board is creating a list of criteria that a site must meet before we consider it further. If anyone sees a property that looks promising, that person can contact the Center and a committee member will get back in touch to screen it. This way we don't set the whole sangha on edge looking at each prospect, and wondering if we are thinking of making an offer. The screening details are still being worked out, but one of them is affordability.

What is the advantage of holding off for now? For one thing, we have successfully refinanced the Dharma House! We obtained a commercial loan when we bought the Sangha House for simplicity in qualifying for the loan, and so that we could qualify quickly to make another purchase should we raise funds in our capital campaign, and should we find a property we would like to buy. Our capital fund raising effort did little to advance our position, however (we have much to learn there), and in the meantime, interest rates dropped dramatically. The refinancing gave us title to both the Zendo and the Sangha House free and clear, we took $40,000 of equity in cash to pay for the improvements we need to make to the Dharma House, and we lowered our payments by about $400 a month. Waiting a few years will improve our equity as we pay off the loan, plus the value of our properties should increase as the improvements are made, giving us more buying power when and if we move.

One other reason for holding off on a move at this time is to support Great Vow Zen Monastery in this time of transition and development. Kyogen made the statement that there is a limited amount of financial support in a city the size of Portland for this type of growth. We would do well not overly stress that resource by starting another large development at a time critical to Great Vow. It is also prudent to keep one Center stable while the other is in transition so that we can support each other in other ways as well.

 

by Jiko

She watches firefly lives in calm repose and then joins in,
waving for a beer as the hawker passes by.

"There is nothing that stays," she purrs.
"No eye or ear,
   
no sight or sound.
No falling bodies on the evening news."
She sips her cold beer; adjusts the brim of her cap against the light.
The crowd shifts in their seats; whole innings pass, unseen.
  
And me - I'm just another one of these knock-kneed lonesome fools
  
howling at the scoreboard.
She sees, she smiles.
"All you think is firm, gives way.
   
"And all that gives way is your ground."
Then she winks, and reaches for the peanuts.

And still I don't believe it, stung by regret,
   
bruised by hope, my mind on other things.
"Here," she presses the peanuts into my hand.
"Remember -
   
All that is marked, pocked, scarred, rent, bent and broken
    is well." She takes another sip.
"Now, watch the game."

So finally I try to follow each swing and nothing more -
the unjust strikes, sly throws that catch the runners off the bag,
   
each lucky hit.
   
and slowly the rest fades away,
   
and slowly I am freed and find myself
loose as this warm afternoon free of clocks and bosses
and in the sun-stroked glare we hear that longed-for smack,
watch the ball sail into the whitening sky and disappear
   
and miracle of miracles, here we are.

Soon it will be our turn to sail away -
to climb into our little boat and ride across the stream.

This we call prajnaparamita;
we call this best of all,
rocking in the gentle breeze,
the steady lap of small waves as we ride,
A
nd most of all, oh most of all, the pleasure of the rowing,

Until we ship the oars and let the water carry us home,
   whispering
        on, on, no stopping now.

- Jiko .

 

 

beginning of Newsletter

 

Zen Center News

News now has its own, separate page. For news events of July-August 2002 Click here to go to our News Page.

 

 

   
 

 


STILL POINT archive edit of 27 October 2002
Dharma Rain Zen Center Newsletter
Dharma Rain Logo
Volume XXVII Number 4 July/August 2002
Copyright Northwest Zen Sangha.
No portion of this publication
may be reproduced in any form
without permission.
This Web page may be linked
to other Web pages provided
its contents is not altered in any way.
email to Staff@Dharma-Rain.Org

Save a tree


([an error occurred while processing this directive])

If there are broken links or other problems with this page, contact the Still Point Web Manager, Jeanette Ryan, at jryan@ipns.com