Finally, you will come to a vastness that is like spring water endlessly coming up out of the earth… From where does this spring water come?  Not from anyone’s small, individual territory.  The water that comes from your territory is limited, not deep.  The original nature of your life, or of your study, or of your personality or character is the spring water that comes up from the vastness of the earth.  This is where you have to sit down.

from Returning to Silence by Dainin Katagiri

The second time I felt a deep inexplicable connection was during an all-day sitting at a zen center nearby.  It was my first all day sitting and I was very scared about my ability to get through it.  The first rounds of sitting were fine and then we settled in for the dharma talk.  The teacher sat on a raised platform in the middle of the room and his attendants worked around him to set up the microphones, podium and his papers.  He simply sat, letting it all happen without directing the push and pull of wires, tables and tablets.  When it all seemed almost ready, his personal assistant moved in and gently began to arrange the folds in the teacher’s robes.  He straightened the pleats, layered the material around his teacher’s seat and legs, and smoothed the wrinkles of the robe along his back.  The teacher sat unmoving, surrendering with complete trust to the ministrations of his assistant.  I felt a huge swell of emotion rise from the depth of my body, so intense I thought it would emerge as a gasp or a cry and shatter what had become a thick silence.  In dokusan, I tried to explain what I had felt but it was beyond words.  I think I only managed to say something about wanting to be “in service like that” to which the teacher replied that it took a lot of time to become a teacher’s personal assistant.

I wasn’t sad or disappointed that he failed to hear what I was trying to say.  I’ve come to understand that often in trying to verbalize our experiences of connection, we can convey a neediness, an ambition or a greed.  Where before I used to feel offended, now I’ve tried to listen carefully and direct my self-inquiry to clarify my intentions without diminishing the experience itself. The truth is I don’t even think I knew what it was I experienced in these connecting moments.  And, delusions are numberless.

I went on to practice in other centers and with other teachers, watchful for these “spring water” experiences.  It remains as a marker that there is a vastness beneath the concepts and formulations of practice.  Although I’ve not been blessed with the same intensity of connection, in the years of practice which include experiences of deep joy and profound anguish, one thing has remained from both experiences.  There is a connection that transcends the gaze and there is a move into service that is beyond any act, singular or collective.  Experiencing it cannot be forced through any form of practice.  It will not adhere to any rules of engagement.  But its presence is always available and always absolute.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Next: Friday

Zazen is the right gate for entering the Buddha-dharma.  But the Buddha-dharma is actually human life.  So this zazen is not an exclusive practice; it is the most fundamental practice for all sentient beings.  For instance, when you really want to know who you are or what the real significance of human life, human suffering, pleasure, Buddhist teaching is, very naturally you come back to silence.  Even though you don’t want to, you return to an area of no-sound.  It cannot be explained, but in this silence you can realize, even if only dimly, what the real point is that you want to know.  Whatever kind of question you ask or whatever you think, finally you have to return to silence.  This silence is vast; you don’t know what it is.

from Returning to Silence by Dainin Katagiri

The larger questions of life and death tend to escape me.  In my practice, I find myself circling around on questions that are about the relational aspects of practice.  If there is good to be done eventually, universes on the brink of disaster to be saved, I think it will come as a side effect of saving relationships.  This is probably the toughest part of practice for me: dropping under the conceptual frameworks and experiencing the relational.

I remember two occasions when I felt a profound clarity of connection.  The first happened when I was about 8 or 9 years old.  Every year, the local schools got together for a sort of “religious career day.”  Students would dress up in the various robes of their school’s religious orders and stand in a diorama of some form of service.  It was all meant to inspire but my brother was already on his way to being a priest so I had little interest in following any religious life path.  My parents, on the other hand, were staunch supporters of school events and attended each one with all the pomp and ceremony of a royal visit.  Bored and frustrated, I followed them through the buzz of the crowds going from display to display, just pushing the limits of willful sullenness.  Then I saw her: a young girl not much older than I was, dressed in a nun’s habit with a backdrop symbolizing the missionary work of the Methodist Church.  Our eyes connected and she smiled.  That’s all.  No angel music, no light show, no out-of-body experiences.  Just a clarity of vision in that look we exchanged in a room that had become totally silent to my ears.

There would be other times when I experienced this clarity of vision in the other across a room.  In a moment’s connection, something was shared that I cannot describe or reproduce in myself, by myself.  I’ve realized that it had nothing to do with the props: the nun’s habit, the room, the rituals, even the eye contact.  These were ingredients that allowed something to emerge and the world to quiet.  When it first happens, I feel a jolting fear that something is about to be lost, that I’ve arrived too late.  It’s taken a very determined practice to stay only with the connection and not fall into the fear of what might have been lost already.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Next: vision of service