October 22, 2014
Body of the Way Practice Period
Dear Bodhisattvas,
Last week’s meditation retreat at the Abbey in Canon City, under big old trees that turned deeper and deeper shades of gold as we sat, was also blessed with a strong, warm practice body from Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Colorado mountains, and Tuscon. The Hall was full and the meditations were still and vibrantly alive.
So now we enter the next phase of our practice period, with each of us exploring the practices of heart-mind in all aspects of life—as “waking and eating, embracing and sleeping, we walk on the empty sky.”
And to support these,
Our Autumn koan series starts this Sunday: Sunday afternoons, 3 to 5 PM at the Creek Bend Zendo, 7528 Jenkin Place: Oct. 26, Nov. 2, 9, 23 and 30. For each of these weeks, we will take up a koan, and we will take up as companion to the koan a selection from our founding teacher, Joan Sutherland’s manual for koan practice: Acequias and Gates.
We meet at the Creek Bend Zendo (which is also my home) at 7528 Jenkin Place, Colorado Springs. You are welcome to arrive any time starting at 2:30 to get settled in, have a cup of tea and a cookie, chat with others….and then at 3:00 we’ll begin with some meditation as we enter the koan together. Our discussions are leisurely and open-ended. The spirit of the inquiry is this: as we listen deeply to hear each other’s experiences of the koan, we allow the koan to speak with a fuller and fuller voice, and the Way reveals itself in our midst. Each of us is both host and guest here.
I strongly encourage you to spend time with Acequias and Gates during this time. You can purchase an online version pretty inexpensively at Blurb.com. SMS also has a couple of loaner copies.
For this Sunday, here’s the passage we’ll bring in:
“…Awakening…happens in relationship. We meditate together and talk together, we hear birds calling and cars laboring up a hill. We tend a feverish child, recite the words of the ancestors. As Ma and Shitou did with each other, we find a deep communion with someone we’ve never met. We spend a lot of time in the company of our thoughts and feelings, and sometimes we are a companion to silence. Our meditation is made not just of the vastness and the deep engine of concentration, it is also made of these relationships. And then one day, for no apparent reason, something in particular comes to fetch us: the morning star rises, or the retreat ook coughs, and we fall open. A particular intimate meeting with a particular other opens us to an intimate relationship with life itself.”
And here’s the koan:
Baling’s In a Silver Bowl
Blue Cliff Record, Case 13
From a new translation by John Tarrant and Joan Sutherland
A student asked Baling, “What is Zen?” ¡
“A silver bowl filled with snow.” ¡¡
The Full Text of Baling Haojian’s Three Turning Words
What is Zen?
A silver bowl filled with snow.
What is the Way?
A clear-sighted person falls into a well.
What is the sword so sharp it cuts a hair blown against it?
Each branch of coral holds up the moon. ¡¡¡
¡ Literally, “What is Kanadeva’s school?” Kanadeva (‘One-eyed Deva’) was an Indian Buddhist teacher considered the founder of the Dhyana (Chan/Zen) school, which Bodhidharma brought to China; he was the dharma heir of Nagarjuna, one of the greatest of Buddhist philosophers, and was himself a renowned philosopher, writing a major work of the Madhyamaka School on emptiness. The Japanese teacher Tenkei comments, “The Kanadeva school means the Buddha-mind school, the school of the enlightened mind…Ultimately the whole universe should be seen as the school of the enlightened mind.”
¡¡ Dongshan’s “Jewel Mirror Samadhi” begins:
The teaching of suchness, intimately given by buddhas and ancestors—
now that it’s yours, keep it well.
A silver bowl filled with snow; a white heron hidden in the moonlight—
Apart, they seem similar; together, they’re different.
¡¡¡ Yunmen said to his student Baling, “When you hold memorial services for me after I’m dead, just restate these three turning phrases and you’ll have repaid my kindness,” and that’s what Baling did. When he became a teacher, Baling didn’t create a document of succession for his dharma heirs; he used these three phrases to transmit the essence of the Yunmen school.