Tag Archives: Katagiri

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this silence

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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

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looks like coming

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It’s not possible to separate going and coming.  In a literal sense, I’ve gone from and come to a number of different practice centers.  In the very real sense of life-and-death, it’s been a persistent struggle to embody oneness with what is.  In Returning to Silence, Katagiri writes,”This is just going, just coming.”  He tells the story of Gutei’s one finger: Tenryu, Gutei’s teacher, always held up one finger in answer to everything.  Gutei thought this was a terrific answer so copied it.  The long and short of it was that Tenryu chopped off Gutei’s finger.  This enlightened Gutei to the truth of authenticity, of being exactly who you are without parroting another’s reality.

This is a tough path for a fundamentally deluded person.  How can I skillfully use the teachings without pantomiming the teacher?  At the level of practice, I began with TM and slowly unfolded into zazen.  I don’t recall how that evolved except that it has.  I’ve been sitting since I was 19 years old when meditation began as an attempt to sustain a relationship with a boy friend who wanted to learn TM.  Later, as I faced challenges and disappointments, meditating became first a way to cope with stress and then just a way to be with myself.  As I became involved with mindfulness communities, particularly as a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, practice emerged as a way to be with others.

The process of mimicking the teacher is a natural beginning for any student.  We take on the persona of those we perceive to be more powerful or who, we believe, have salvaged our lives.  We fall in love easily with the person who plucks us from the wild ocean, confusing relief to have escaped death for an enduring commitment of the rescuer.  Inevitably, that kind of clinging, greedy connection will be severed like Gutei’s finger.  When it has happened to me, the pain was overwhelming and the silence made some forms of practice intolerable.  I can’t tell you why I’ve persisted with my practice through such pain, except that it’s now the only thing I know to do.  I think it’s a form of skillful waiting: waking, washing, eating, working, crying, laughing, drinking tea.  Laying down the path, moment by moment, step by step – not because anyone has told me so but because it is what is going to get done anyway.  Eventually, out of that process comes a clarity – first, of what is being practiced and then, an authentic ownership of practicing.

Through all the transitions and evolutions, however, I’ve felt a sense that the song stops short of the last verse, the last note.  Perhaps this is what the Chaplaincy path is about: a transition to practice what is outward-moving, a challenge to cultivate a way of being for others that is built on all the joy and disappointments that form the bedrock of my practice to this point.  Keeping that don’t-know mind is going to be a particular challenge over the next two years.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Next: gate of silence