Vimalakirti Sutra Study Series with Sarah Bender
Tuesdays, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
April 26; May 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31; June 7, 14
7528 Jenkin Place
Requested donation: $10/ class
contact: sembender@gmail.com
Registration is required.
Dear Sangha Members and Friends,
We’ve received permission from Joan Sutherland, Roshi to offer a Vimalakirti Sutra Study Group using her very rich series of talks. We’ll individually listen to the week’s talk and read a section before each class, and then have the class time for meditation with, and conversation around, the material. I’ll also open each class with a brief talk. The requested donation of $10/class will go to Cloud Dragon Dharma Works to support Joan’s work. She is sending us, for this series, the as yet unpublished manuscript for her new book on the Sutra! We’ll have access to her current thought on this.
Here’s something Joan says about the sutra:
The theme of The Sutra as Spoken by Vimalakirti is nonduality, or as the Chinese say with typical pungency, not two. It’s about not two in a lot of different ways. Vimalakirti lived a life of a householder but was also deeply committed to his spiritual practice, and didn’t see those two things as different. He was a great bodhisattva, and he was sick. And this same theme of not two appeared over the next 1500 years in China, embodied in many different ways.
In the koan tradition, when presented with an apparent duality, we talk about resolving it not by choosing one or the other, A or B, but by looking for C, for that new thing that can contain and embrace A and B and create something new. Here, Vimalakirti himself is C, the reconciliation of the opposites; and so he is a great person to speak to us.
We will be working a translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra by Burton Watson. There are others, which you might find interesting as supplementary resources. In case you have trouble getting your hands on the Burton translation, you can also start with an online link that J. Vitkus is able to offer (with permission).
For the first class, we’ll read the introduction and Chapter One, listen to the first of Joan’s talks, and read her first section, if it arrives by then.
And here are some more recent words and an invitation, from Joan Sutherland, Roshi:
The Sutra that Vimalakirti Spoke is a two-thousand-year-old sacred text that is startlingly strange. Vimalakirti is a bodhisattva lying on his sickbed – and isn’t the whole point of enlightenment to elevate someone beyond the limitations and sorrows of ordinary life? But Vimalakirti doesn’t seem to want to be elevated; he says, “I am sick because the whole world is sick.” The implications of his explanation, which is also an expression of love and a vow, reverberate throughout the text.
We take up this story of a deeply awake householder who explored the very agonies and beauties of human life we’re still talking about today. This is a somewhat unorthodox vision of the Vimalakirti sutra, focusing on its radical allegiance to life and to healing the human heart.
From April through July we will be sending out eight mp3 recordings of talks given by Joan in 2011.
To subscribe,
http://joansutherlanddharmaworks.org/Subscribe_Donate/Gifts_Subscriptions/index.html
I’d like to warmly encourage you to subscribe if you can, as this is another way we can support Joan Sutherland’s work, from which we so greatly benefit!
Meanwhile, I will be able to send out a link to the first talk once you register. Looking forward to seeing you!
Thanks,
Sarah